


It's hard to know which one of us is caving

by sarcasticbones



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alcohol, Alive Erica, Alive Laura Hale, Alpha Derek, Alpha Laura, Alpha Laura Hale, Anal Sex, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Awesome Laura Hale, BAMF Lydia, BAMF Stiles, Blow Jobs, Blud, Boys Kissing, Dark, Depression, Derek Hale's heart is breaking and there's blood everywhere, Derek Needs To Use His Words, Derek's Eyebrows, Dirty Talk, Drugs, F/M, Fighting, Fire Flower, Hand Jobs, Hurt Stiles, Insecure Stiles Stilinski, Jealous Derek, Kidnapped Stiles, Kidnapping, Laura Hale can turn into a full wolf, Lydia POV, M/M, Magic Creatures, Mildly Dubious Consent, Miscommunication, Misunderstanding, Polish folklore, Possessed Stiles Stilinski, Powerful Magic, Quest, Rough Oral Sex, Rough Sex, Scenting, Scott is a Bad Friend, Self-Sacrificing Derek, Stiles POV, Stiles and Laura, Stiles has a grandmother, Stiles hits a girl, Stiles is a powerful mage, Stilinski Strength, Tattooed Stiles Stilinski, Top Derek, Torture, Witchcraft, Worried Derek, alpha is a good color on Derek Hale, another realm, encyclopedia of Derek Hale's smiles, forest fae, gratuitous use of Polish and French, herbs, magic made me do it, magic sex, magic spells, screwy magic, self assured Derek Hale, sex that grows stuff, spark thief, stiles is dying, top laura, worried Laura, worried lydia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-31
Updated: 2016-09-25
Packaged: 2018-07-28 12:05:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 24
Words: 42,650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7639537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sarcasticbones/pseuds/sarcasticbones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles is a badass, it just takes him some bumps and bruises to figure out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. One

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aerialiste](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aerialiste/gifts).



> OK, first ever fanfic, so you know *shifty eyes*  
> Have been reading SPN & TW for years, but then the lovely aerialiste posted a fic for me and it apparently broke something in my head.  
> So this is from a broken head. 
> 
> According to plan this should have about 13 chapters. But my chapters have been known to multiply.
> 
> I will add more tags as I post more and they become relevant. Also as I figure this whole thing out more. It won't be all that explicit in the first couple of chapters. Slow-build could be my middle name, but it's John (thank you Eddie Izzard). 
> 
> Fair warning - this might be a better read if your moral compass doesn't quite point north.
> 
> It's also darkish, and there will be angst. But it shouldn't hopelessly break anyone's heart. I mean ... it might, but should also kiss it better by the end. At least that's the plan, to kiss it better by the end. 
> 
> Title from "Stay" but in a 30 Seconds to Mars cover. Because of reasons. 
> 
> Ok, I'm super uncomfortable now. This is like a dating app profile.

The first time Stiles sees the Hales – well, some of the Hales, because there are more; a few by blood, some by fate, but he doesn’t know that yet – he is 15 years old and in a cherry tree. Not one of the nice manicured one’s in the ‘pick’em yourself’ section of the orchard either. He’s in a wild, over-grown one; with unruly branches, and very few berries in hard to reach places. Because Stiles “doesn’t have the demeanor for assisting the customers” in the tame trees. This is what Aunt May says.

Well, this is what Mrs. Goldstein says, but the orchard is called Aunt May’s Pie Orchard, so everyone has to call her Aunt May.

And Stiles is doing three months of hard labor on Aunt May’s Pie Orchard, no parole. No phone, no internet, no Scott. Sheriff’s verdict.

It was that or Teen Rescue in Lake Elsinore. And Stiles could have probably done Teen Rescue, would have as a “fuck you” to the Sheriff for checking out for 5 years, but he chose the Orchard, because well … Scott. And he might have gotten a bit carried away, maybe. The thing is ever since … well ever since he was ten, he had been afraid.

Afraid that the Sheriff was going to get sick an die too.

Afraid that Scott’s dad was going to come back and ask Scott to go with him.

Afraid that Scott would choose to go.

So Stiles never had the anger part of grief. It’s like him and the Sheriff spilt the grief sundae. Stiles got the bargaining and it’s ever-present shadow, the fear. And Sheriff took the anger, soaked thoroughly in bourbon. But then puberty tossed it’s Molotov cocktail into Stiles’ brain and Stiles decided he was no longer afraid. Careened headfast into reckless abandon. It was spectacular.

  
For a while he entertained himself by robotripping with the syrup heads in the arts basement. That got boring fast. So he upgraded to a few memorable nights of special K at the Jungle, and a few equally memorable, sweaty, stacy-laced handjob exchanges with random rolling dudes in equally random bar bathrooms. But that was expensive and Stiles isn’t stupid, so he branched out.  
He sold 2/3 of his Adderall to the assholes at BHHS, padding the holes it left with Sheriff’s booze. He bough weed with the money, and xannies for emergencies. He got into a few fights with the dumbasses he was selling to, and then into a few beat downs from the bigger dumbasses, whose market he was apparently encroaching on. He liked the fights better than he liked the drugs. Tonguing at the copper flavored insides of his busted lip made him feel bright, light and sharp. But Scott didn’t understand. And finally the Sheriff noticed.

“Excuse me,” one of the three people standing under Stiles’ tree says. He has a disturbing smile, a neck too beefy for the rest of his admittedly admirable frame. His pale blue eyes look like they could peel paint.  
“We’re looking for the peach trees.”  
Which, what? What even. Are they going to bury a body under the peach trees? Are peach trees better to bury bodies under than cherry trees? Stiles knows they are criminals. Sheriff has a bunch of open files with HALE all over them. But Stiles is hot, and tired; cherry juice is running down his forearms like blood, and he is adamantly unafraid. So when approached by three potentially criminal, ridiculously leather-and-aviator clad Hales inquiring for peaches, of all things, Stiles does what he usually does. Picks at where it itches.  
“Why,” Stiles says, grabbing a hold of a branch with both of his hands and leaning forward, far enough for his “I’m a virgin – this is an old t-shirt” shirt to ride up: “don’t you want a cherry-pie, daddy?”  
The woman on Disturbing Smile’s right throws her head back and laughs, rows of preternaturally bright, aggressive looking teeth on display, and it throws Stiles just a bit. He fumbles, has to adjust his grip, leaning out too far until he has no choice but to step away from the ladder and just hang on. The woman laughs some more.  
“Charming,” is all that Disturbing Smile has to say, but he cocks his head at the angular man with a rage tick in his jaw, and that one stomps over.  
For a moment Stiles thinks Rage Tick is going to punch him in the gut, and he would take it too, because holy shit that is one beautiful human. A dark monolith of perfect planes, eyes brimming with aggressive energy. He’d know how to punch too, Stiles is sure of it. Anticipation flickers through Stiles’ faulty wires. But then there are two strong arms raised towards him, so Stiles adjusts his assumptions and expects to be helped down from the tree like a fucking toddler. Naturally, Stiles’s is about to let go, chance breaking both his ankles to refuse the condescending assistance. Rage Tick freezes then, nostrils flaring. Cocks his head to the side like he’s heard something. Stiles is left staring at the porcelain shell of his ear. Ludicrously delicate in the thicket of coarse, black hair. Rage Tick gets over whatever moment he’s having, pulls Stiles’ t-shirt down as far as it will go and says: “I love cherry pie.”  
Stiles’ shoulders twinge and cherry bark is carving shapes into his palms, but Rage Tick flashes a quick, violent grin and proceeds to pat Stiles on the belly.

Then they leave.

They walk away, and Stiles is hanging from a cherry branch until he can’t any more. He doesn’t break his ankles, but he busts his knee. He pokes at the scabs for as long as he has them.

*

The second time Stiles sees any of the Hales, he’s 16 and stumbling through a dark alley on a school night, drunk but not high. The disturbing, blue-eyed Hale is standing over a crumpled body, wiping blood from his mouth.  
“Ah, Cherry Pie,” the man says: “best run along now, must be past your curfew, I’m sure someone would miss you.” His voice is lower than Stiles remembers, but sweeter too, cloying and terrifying. Stiles isn’t sure if he emphasized the “someone” or the “would,” but it unsettles the soil, where Stiles’ panic and pain are buried. Because someone would. Right? The sheriff would. Scott would. Right? The toxic dump of things-Stiles-doesn’t-feel starts oozing through the stratigraphy of his denial. “Chop, chop,” the blue eyed Hale says, wiping his chin on his own shoulder: “don’t want me to take a special interest, do you, boy; there’s gotta be someone you don’t want to lose.”  
Stiles runs.  
He runs all the way home and makes enough noise getting in the house for Sheriff to come out of his bedroom. So Stiles throws himself at the Sheriff’s sinewy frame, and he is honestly not expecting it, he isn’t. But Sheriff opens his arms and rubs the back of his head and mumbles a wet: “kid.” Because there is someone Stiles doesn’t want to lose. There are two someones. But the sheriff is his dad and his feet ran here.

*

By the time Stiles turns 17 he is back to being afraid fulltime. He’s afraid that his dad will “accidentally” die on duty. He’s afraid that Scott will kill Allison. He’s afraid Scott will kill his own mom. His afraid Scott will join the Hales. He’s afraid Scott will find out that Stiles didn’t choose him, that Stiles ran home to his dad, and it’s all Stiles’ fault that Peter turned Scott. He’s afraid Peter will tell Scott.  
Because the Hales aren’t a gang skillfully hiding their life of crime. Well they are. It’s just that life of crime is not the only thing they are skillfully hiding. And Peter is getting more and more violent, littering Beacon Hills with suspicious animal attacks. The blue of his eyes burns like acid when it lingers on your skin, because now Stiles knows it’s just covering the red. Laura and Derek still flank him wherever he goes, but their grins are brittle.

Stiles gives up drinking, and fighting, and drugs. He takes all of his own Adderall, because he can’t afford not to. He covers up his fear with the masks he learned during his brief stint as a bad kid. The sneers and the sunglasses serve him well. So he sneers and spends all of his time researching. He studies moon calls for Scott; coaches Scott for control; keeps Scott away from the Hales; makes sure Scott doesn’t fail any of his classes; makes sure Allison’s father doesn't shoot Scott. But it’s worth it, because it’s Scott. And even know, after he’s been bitten, after he’s found Allison, he’s still Stiles’ person. Sure, he is always late and sometimes forgets to show up, but he apologizes. He keeps a stash of Twizzlers in his backpack just for Stiles, and smiles like Stiles is the sun, whenever Stiles shows up with a new, hopeless plan, to bump him up a level in lycanthropy. And Stiles would do it without the smiles and the Twizzlers, because it’s all his fault anyway.  
Stiles grows tall, his face narrows, corners of his lips turn up first, like a memory from when he was a bright, ebullient kid; then down, from life happening. It gives him a Grinch-like, manic smile. He’s a mean looking kid, when you stop and really look. But no one ever does. He sleeps in short, shallow bursts. There’s a permanent tremor in his left hand, which he knows would stop if he’d swallow half a xannie or a shot of bourbon, because Stiles is not stupid, he did his research, he knows what this is. But he doesn’t because he can’t afford to. He has people he can’t lose. He has to remain vigilant, even if it’s the hyper kind.


	2. Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> stuff happens, Derek and Laura have a plan, Stiles gets books.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (a) you guys are really super nice, you read, and left kudos and comments!!  
> (b) today is really a super lame day,  
> (c) same notes from before apply,  
> (d) oh look, chapter two 
> 
> xox

It’s ironic really, that in the end it’s Stiles who convinces Scott to listen, when Laura and Derek issue a drive by demand for a meeting. All of this time he has spent keeping Scott away from the Hale pack, and yet he’s the one, who comes up with the best location for a rendez-vous. One Scott could run from, should it all turn to shit. Stiles couldn’t anyway.  
They slowly make their way through the abandoned train depot. Stiles keeps his shaking hand buried in his pocket, and in the other he holds the Maglite he’s appropriated from the Sheriff’s station.  
He hears Scott whisper “Stiles,” at the same time he hears glass crunch under a heavy boot a couple of paces ahead of them.

“Really, you let the blind, helpless human lead the way?” Laura Hale’s voice asks. It’s low, almost raspy, almost seductive if it weren’t for its razor edges.  
But Stiles has so much experience with being scared by now. He shines the Maglite at where he thinks her face to be, and she covers her flashing eyes in a superhuman movement, with an equally superhuman hiss. There’s an angry snap of teeth from her left.  
“No teeth, Grady twins, or we’re leaving,” Stiles says with bravado he doesn’t feel. Scott steps closer to him, warm and solid behind his back.  
Stiles points the Maglite further up, creating a pale circle of light on the grimy ceiling. It lifts the darkness by increments. He can barely pick out Laura’s shape, the fact that she is wearing dark jeans and a black leather jacket.  
“If we were interested in eating you,” Derek materializes on Laura’s side, soundless like a ghost: “you’d already be eaten.”  
Stiles rolls the fingers of his trembling hand into a fist, presses his nails into his palm. Somewhere in his spine, where all of his bad ideas nest, a whisper detaches, and floats through his system. “Yes please, feel free to eat me,” it chants.  
“You wanted to talk, talk,” Scott says.  
“It’s not human business.”  
Stiles can see Derek a bit better now, his eyes adjusting to the meager light the Maglite creates outside of it’s immediate beam. He too, is wearing dark jeans and a black leather jacket. He looks both dead and deadly in the robust shadows.  
Scott scoffs.  
“Cherry Pie can stay,” Laura offers, and Stiles jerks at the nickname, because Peter used it, with some poor sap’s blood still on his tongue. Just before he threatened to hurt someone Stiles loves. Just before he turned Scott.  
“Don’t call me that,” slips from his lips before he manages to clamp them shut.  
Laura flicks her wrist in a royal “whatever.”  
At least the rage tick Stiles can barely make out in Derek’s jaw is familiar.  
“Fine,” Derek says, tone flat, eyes narrowed, every fiber of his body resenting Stiles’ presence. It curls around Stiles like a physical thing, a thick fabric of disdain. That’s ok; Stiles can live with disdain. Stiles is accustomed to disdain.  
“We can work with disdain,” the whisper from before promises.  
“We’re taking out Peter,” Laura says, and the tick in Derek’s jaw get’s more pronounced. 

 

Derek, or Laura - Stiles doesn’t know, because he never sees them actually doing it – start leaving books for Stiles to try and decipher in his car. Not in the back, nor on the windshield; no, in his car. They come to the school parking lot, in the middle of the day, pick his car lock without breaking it, leave a sack with probably invaluable tomes of myth, lore and magic in Stiles’ car, and lock it behind them as they leave. Nobody notices. It’s very reassuring. Stiles tries to figure out what he can from the books; piece together hints on how to take out an alpha werewolf. They’re not obvious, let’s put it like that. 

That first night Derek had claimed they don’t need Scott and Sitles’ actual help. The only reason for involving Scott, he claimed, had been so he’d get word to Christ Argent. And Chris Argent would keep the hunters out of it. So they wouldn’t show up at the most inopportune moment and distract Derek, or Laura or one of the other ones on their side. But Stiles showed up for the follow-up midnight gathering with a stack of printouts on the lore he’d found online.  
“This says there are things we can do to weaken him, things he won’t notice,” he said waving his papers around until Laura took them from him.  
“I don’t have time to go through these,” she said: “most of this is probably crap. We’ll bring you some books.”  
Derek grumbled. A low, petulant sound from somewhere deep in his belly. It only stopped after Laura nudged him hard enough he had to take a half step back. Whatever her arguments were, in that wordless exchange, they must have been good, because the books started showing up. 

So Stiles spends all of the time he can spare from school, and Scott, and his dad, researching lore. Until suddenly he has much more free time, because Laura shows up in his bedroom one night. 

“So,” she says from his desk chair, when he flicks on the lights.  
She’s patient too, as Stiles speeds through a procession of fight or flight reactions; just twirls herself back and forth in lazy crescents, eyes tracking all of Stiles’ movements - from the hand pressed to his mouth, to the sweat on his brow, to his failed attempts of flicking off the invigorated tremors by shaking his hand out.  
“Done?” she asks, when Stiles has gotten most of his breath back.  
Stiles flips her off, trudges over to his bed and plops down.  
Laura smiles with all of her teeth.  
“I’m charmed and all, but what are you doing here?” Stiles asks.  
“I realized something,” Laura keeps twirling in the chair, and it’s kind of giving Stiles vertigo: “I realized I don’t know what you want.”  
Stiles stares at her. Her toned thighs, wrapped in gray denim, are splayed, and her elbows are resting on the armrests.  
“A pony,” Stiles says, thinking about what she looks like naked. If she’s waxed of hides a bush in those tight jeans.  
Laura throws her head back and laughs a full, throaty laugh that would surely rouse the Sheriff, if he were here. But Laura knows he’s not here. She has creepy werewolf senses that Stiles knows so little about, because Scott has basically no control, and the new books he has only describe alpha powers; which Stiles has gleaned, are extraordinary.  
“No really, Stiles, why are you helping, what do you want?”  
“I want Peter dead.”  
“Why?”  
“Because he’s a psychopath.”  
Laura makes an assenting noise somewhere in her throat, but keeps her eyes on his, clearly wanting more.  
“Because I’m worried about Scott,” Stiles adds, voice lower, and lower yet: “and my dad.”  
Laura hums.  
“But what do you want?” she asks again.  
Irritation scratches at the insides of Stiles’ skull: “what do you mean? That is what I want. I want my dad and Scott to be safe, and I think they would be considerably safer if Peter was dead.”  
Laura stops twirling and rests both of her elbows on her knees, chin in hand: “that is the reason for why you are helping, yes, but what would you like in return?”  
Stiles stares.  
Laura keeps looking at him.  
Stiles blinks.  
Because he has no idea.  
Why is she offering?  
What is she offering? 

“Tell you what,” Laura says, standing up: “you think on it, and you let us know. We’ll be stopping by to see if you have any ideas from the books.”  
She pulls a rubber band from her hair, combs through the cascade of black with bony, white fingers, and pulls it into a new, tighter ponytail.  
“See ya, kid,” she says, and climbs out of his window.

 

Two nights later it’s Derek. Stiles feels marginally less like he’s about to shit himself. Perhaps he’s getting used to being ambushed.  
Derek is also sitting in Stiles’ chair, but he is leaning back, his feet propped up on the windowsill. He turns around to fully face Stiles, once Stiles resurfaces from the initial heart palpitations, and wrinkles his nose.  
“You smell bad,” he says.  
“Excuse me?” Stiles is still pressing a hand to his heart from being scared half to death by a hulking stranger in his dark bedroom, and he doesn’t care that he’s a perfect picture of a scandalized Victorian heroine.  
“Fear makes you smell bad,” Derek says as if that was a thing. To say. Or even just a thing.  
“Maybe you shouldn’t hide in dark bedrooms then, it tends to scare people,” Stiles offers, much more mildly than he had planned.  
“I wasn’t hiding. And you always smell of fear,” he points a look at the hand Stiles’ is hiding in his pocket.  
Stiles yanks his hand out and waves it in what he hopes is an approximation of Laura’s conversation-ending ‘whatever wrist’.  
Derek raises his eyebrows.  
“Is there a reason for this visit?” Stiles asks: “besides scaring me and insulting my resulting odor, which also, what the fuck, why don't any of the books say you can smell fear, what else can you smell?”  
Derek raises his eyebrows again, and Stiles momentarily mourns his loss of cool.  
“What?! What? You came into my room, I didn’t come to you, so you need to tell me what you want, and also answer my totally legitimate questions about what you guys can smell, because that is very invasive, you know. I did not sign up for being smelled.”  
This time it’s just one of Derek’s eyebrows and the corner of his mouth that ticks in response. He slowly picks up his feet and plants them on the ground.  
Stiles takes a step back: “ah, can you use your words instead of your eyebrows, your eyebrows are making me feel uncomfortable, and I ramble when I’m uncomfortable. Your face is very uncomfortable for me.”  
Derek stands up and somehow straight into Stiles’ personal space.  
“Is it, now,” he says. Stiles can feel Derek’s breath on his face. He takes another step back. Derek moves with him, fluid and soundless, all predator, none human.  
Stiles’ back thunks against his door. He can see the absurdly symmetrical growth of Derek’s stubble. The flecks of color in his irises. He can feel the heat radiating from Derek, and something dumb and useless in his bloodstream whispers: “push, he’ll push back.”  
Stiles swallows, and tries to shake his head a bit. The same corner from before fractions Derek’s mouth up again.  
“Laura said you’d think of what you want,” Derek says, sliding closer still, they’re almost touching. Almost, but no cigar.  
The dumbness in Stiles’ blood yearns to surge up, surge forward, lean in.  
“What,” Stiles says.  
Because most of his cognitive skills are occupied fighting his own blood.  
“Did you figure out what you want, Stiles?” Derek drags his eyes down Stiles’ face, gaze slowing to pancake syrup as it reaches his lips. Pulls in a loud breath through his nose, because he’s an asshole.  
Stiles swallows. Tamps down the hopeless, suicidal whispers in his blood and bones and says: “I want you guys to teach Scott werewolf stuff, but not force him into your pack, if he doesn’t want to.”  
Whatever mojo Derek was laying on him stops, locks and lifts. Derek seems to still be surely in Stiles’ personal space, but his body-heat is no longer wrapping Stiles in a mind-altering cocoon.  
For a moment they just stand there, too close and not close enough, staring. Finally Derek shrugs and steps away.  
“You’re a weird one, you know that, kid,” he says, walking towards the window.  
“Is that a yes?” Stiles asks.  
“And don’t call me kid, I’m not a kid,” he adds.  
“And didn’t you bring me any more books?”  
Derek pauses, fishes a small book from the inner pocket of his leather jacket.  
“Be careful with this,” he says, gently laying it on the corner of Stiles’ desk.  
Stiles scoffs.  
“What about Scott?” he demands.  
“We’ll think about it,” is the last he hears as Derek fluidly disappears into the night.


	3. Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> who smells like what and makings of a plan.   
> Stiles get's to hang out with Derek. kind of.   
> enter Isaac.

“You smell like the Hales,” Scott says the next day at school.   
“Hey, good job on the scenting!” Stiles says. Then amends: “but don’t smell me, that is not OK, Ok? No smelling me. Also, apparently I smell really bad.”  
“What do you mean?” Scott asks, inching closer, sticking his nose down the collar of Stiles’ hoodie.   
“Dude, no, no sniffing Stiles,” Stiles says.   
“I don’t think you smell bad, you always smell this way,” Scott offers.   
Stiles sighs. That’s what Derek had said. He always smells like this.  
“I think they are going to teach you stuff, secret werewolf stuff,” he offers instead.  
“The Hales?” Scott asks.   
Stiles rolls his eyes.   
“But I don’t want to join them, you said it yourself, they’re psychos, and we don’t want anything to do with their pack,” Scott stops walking, and gets alarmingly loud for a school hallway.   
“Peter’s the psycho, but yes,” Stiles whispers and drags Scott along: “they are going to teach you even if you don’t join their pack, at least I think they are, if I manage to come up with something useful from the books. They’ll do it like payment or something.”  
“Payment?” Scott repeats.  
Stiles nods.   
“For … for you researching stuff for them?”  
Stiles nods again. He does a lot of nodding with Scott. Scott can be a little on the slow side.   
“You’re the best, dude, you know that?” Scott beams.   
Stiles smiles back.   
“Shit,” Scott says then, fishing out his phone to check the time: “I have to run, I’m meeting Allison for five minutes before chemistry.”  
Stiles waves him off. 

For a week it’s nothing. No one shows up in his room unannounced, nothing weird happens. So Stiles spends 5 hours every night figuring out the small book Derek last left.   
And he finds something! He finds little strands of information that he braids into what looks like a blueprint of a plan. He texts Laura’s burner phone for a meet. 

“You’re sure this will work?” Derek is sitting on a mysteriously shredded pleather seat of what was once a train cart.   
“No,” Stiles says.   
“It will work,” Laura is rolling a silver dollar across her knuckles like a fucking magician, staring into the darkness.   
“Ok,” Derek is getting up, shaking out one of his legs. To make room for his dick, Stiles’ mind supplies.   
“Thanks, kid,” Laura says, standing up too.   
“Wait,” Stiles says when they’re mostly out of the train cart: “what about … will you teach Scott?”   
He hates how needy he sounds.   
How scared. How young.   
He works hard to never sound like he feels.   
“Yeah, kid,” Laura says: “we’ll be in touch.”

The next day, as Stiles and Scott are walking across the school parking lot, there’s a dude leaning against Roscoe. He’s tall and beautiful in that pale, placid, romantic way that does absolutely nothing for Stiles.   
“Hey, isn’t that,” Scott starts, and now Stiles sees it too. It’s not a random dude, it’s Isaac Lahey, he transferred to a different school last year, after his father died. He looks taller, bigger, more confident than he used to.   
“Hey,” Lahey says: “Laura sent me.”  
Scott’s eyes are big and kind of turning beta gold in broad daylight.  
“Oh,” he says.   
“Okay, can we not do this here,” Stiles says, elbowing Scott until he has the decency to look down and cover his eyes with his hand.  
“Where then?” Isaac asks.   
“My mom’s home,” Scott mumbles.  
“I guess we’re doing it at my house.”   
Stiles climbs behind the wheel and starts Roscoe. 

It’s weird, having two werewolves in his house, Stiles decides. They stare at each other awkwardly in Stiles’ bedroom.   
“Shouldn’t you, uh …” Stiles starts, but shuts his mouth with a click, when Lahey narrows his eyes at him. Because yes, Stiles was about to suggest they sniff each other.   
“Laura said you’d have questions,” he says to Stiles, eyebrows drawn.   
“I do, we do,” Stiles says: “it’s just that … this is really personal, and we’ve spent a lot of time making sure no one knows about it, it’s kind of weird to just jump into it. And we know nothing about you. It’s a big leap of trust here, dude.”  
Lahey shrugs and digs his phone out of the pocket. Fires off a quick text.  
“Who are you texting?” Stiles demands. He really should look into getting a better survival instinct, now that he’s constantly surrounded by wolves.   
Lahey just stares at him, celestial features veiled in the blankest of expressions.  
“What does the moon feel like to you?” Scott suddenly asks.  
Lahey levels him a long look, cracks his shoulders and sits on Stiles’ floor, Indian style.   
Scott mimics him without hesitation, so they’re facing each other in what looks like a lycanthropic shared meditation.  
Great.   
No, really, Stiles is glad.   
This is what he wanted.   
He sits at his desk and pulls out his headphones. Might as well get some homework done, since his mediation is clearly no longer needed. 

He’s just gotten really immersed in the Econ midterm for Coach, when Isaac suddenly stands up and walks over to the window. He’s sliding it open as Stiles pushes his headphones down around his neck, and first Laura, then Derek climb in.   
“Oh look,” Stiles says: “it’s a party.”  
“We’re going for a run in the preserve, Peter’s out of town for two days,” Laura says, flashing her eyes.   
“So not a party,” Stiles amends. Because clearly he’s not invited. Not that he’d want to. Running … no, he doesn’t want to run in the preserve in the middle of the night. No.   
“Derek is staying with you,” Laura says, looking at Stiles over Isaac, whom she’s pushing towards the window.   
“Why?”  
“Because he likes you and wants to hang out with you,” Laura says and everyone laughs, loud and brash. Like you laugh at things that are utterly absurd. Derek does a suffering thing with his eyes, which Stiles has learned is a classy person’s version of an eye roll. 

“What’s wrong with you?” Derek asks a bit after Scott has pulled the window shut behind him, and the three have run off to chase shadows and squirrels or whatever this werewolf training that Laura has set up is meant to be.   
“Nothing,” Stiles says: “why do you think there’s something wrong with me?”  
“You smell weird.”  
“You said I always smell bad.”  
“You smell different.”  
“Bad different?”  
“Stiles, you don’t smell bad, fear is an oppressing addition to anyone’s scent.”  
Stiles doesn’t know what to say to that, because … well, that was a very long sentence from Derek. And it wasn’t even a declaration of irritation.   
“I’m fine,” he mumbles.  
Derek sits in his chair.   
“Did you … uh … did you need anything?” Stiles asks. Because clearly Derek is not here because he enjoys his company, Laura made that painfully clear.   
“Yeah, can we double check this mistletoe?” Derek says, digging a small packet out of his jacket pocket. He’s not wearing a leather jacket today, but something that is more like a breed between a blazer and a sweater. It’s still black, obviously, but looks less like armor and more like a layer. It leaves Derek … not vulnerable exactly, but touchable. He’s wearing it unzipped, and underneath there’s a gray tank top, thin and tight, following the slopes of what has to be the most defined set of abs. Stiles flicks his gaze away, but it lands on the pronounced curve of Derek’s clavicle, the deep dip where the trapezius folds underneath the bone and hides under the bulge of the pectoral.   
“What,” Stiles says.   
“What?” Derek echoes.  
Stiles sighs. Pulls himself together.   
“Get out of my way,” he says.   
Derek’s eyebrows flick.   
“You want me to look stuff up or not?”  
Derek gets out of the chair slowly, regally; like an offended cat. He moves over, and after a brief hesitation sits on Stiles’ bed.   
“Don’t smell my bed,” Stiles says, before he can catch himself.   
He has his back to Derek, so he can’t be sure, but it sounds like a laugh. A sliver of one.  
“I’ll live,” Derek says.

They check the mistletoe; it is the right kind. It should work. So Laura and Derek have 21 days to feed it to Peter with his coffee. Then it’s the blue moon.   
It should work.   
They are doing everything the books suggested.   
Except that the books are vague, and old, and it was Stiles’ plan, so it may as well fall apart.   
Or backfire. 

Stiles sees less and less of Scott, because he’s hanging out with Isaac, or Laura or Derek as much as he can. To learn. Which is good. That is what Stiles wanted, after all, and it’s kind of the Hales to start teaching him before they know if Stiles’ plan will work. Payment before services rendered. Such goodwill.

Oddly, Derek keeps showing up. He doesn’t really say anything, just climbs in Stiles’ window, makes Stiles double check an aspect of the plan, sits in his chair for a bit and then leaves. Stiles would make fun of him for it; be he’s usual, bitter, sarcastic, shitty little self about it; but he’s lonely, so he doesn’t.


	4. Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> kissing.   
> and the plan doesn't go quite as ... well ... planned.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i feel like the fact that i prefer writing this fic over everything else is a powerful and pathetic metaphor for something. i'm as yet of unclear of what.

The blue moon is tomorrow, and Stiles has been banned from getting anywhere near the burned husk of the Hale house, or Scott, or basically even leaving his house.   
And it makes sense. If he went to scope out the scene, then Peter could smell him there tomorrow, and know something was up. Even if the mistletoe has numbed his senses, as it’s supposed to.   
And Scott is sleeping at Isaacs to mask his cent. Because he will be there for tomorrow’s battle. Because Scott’s werewolfy powers are, now - with his modicum of control - apparently handy. Stiles has no handy powers, so he has to stay away. Never mind that it was his plan. Never mind that the entire reason for Stiles to have devised the plan was to keep Scott as far from Peter as possible. As safe as possible.   
The truth is, it might get everyone killed, his plan. In which case it might even be good to not witness it.   
Stiles thinks.   
Probably.   
He’s reasonably sure.   
Not entirely sure, but that might be the bourbon. Because it is the night before the battle Stiles has orchestrated, but has to sit out, so it’s time for bourbon. He’s already drunk his own secret stash, and is now skimming what he hopes are unnoticeable layers off of the two open bottles his dad’s hidden around the house. One that’s in the living room “for guests,” and the other that is stashed in the bottom drawer of his nightstand.   
It’s good.   
Stiles feels fuzzy.   
He’s been off it for so long it doesn’t take much. His hand is blissfully tremor free; so he’s sitting on the floor, back against the wall, drawing patterns in the air with his steady fingers, trying to not think of how Scott will die tomorrow.   
He fishes his phone out of the back pocket of his jeans with his magically tremor free hand and dials Scott. It rings, once, twice, five times and goes to voicemail.   
“Scott, Scotty,” Stiles says: “don’t you die tomorrow, ok?”  
He hangs up and goes back to swirling dust motes in the moonlight. The light streaks his fingers silver, makes him think of magic, wakes up the dumbness in his bones. It comes in a slither. Snakes into Stiles’ consciousness, coils round the loose ends it can find.   
His fingers are back on his phone, before he really makes a decision.   
“Can you turn into a full wolf?” he types out.   
Hits send.   
All before his brain comes back online.   
Drops the phone like it burns once it does. It sits there on the carpet, a black block of a bad choice, and Stiles stares at it until it flashes with an incoming message.   
“No.”  
Well … that’s concise. But informative. Also, surprisingly inoffencive.   
“That’s too bad, you’d probably be a good looking wolf,” Stiles types.  
“Are you drunk?” comes back.  
Ha, that’s more like it. Also, perceptive.   
“Kinda,” he sends.   
“I’m coming over,” Derek replies.   
Which, what? No. That’s unnecessary.   
“Why?” Stiles types.   
But Derek doesn’t reply. So Stiles finishes his stolen booze, and scoots away from the wall. Lowers himself to the floor and plugs in his earphones. Turns the music up, lets it lull him.

He doesn’t open his eyes when his window creaks, nor when footsteps come closer. Derek nudges his thigh with the toe of his boot, like he’s road kill. Stiles pulls out one of the earphones and scowls.   
“Easy with the affection,” he says.   
“I thought you were passed out,” Derek says.   
Stiles scoffs.   
“Why are you on the floor?”  
“It’s nice.”  
Derek huffs a breath and sits down next to him.   
“You didn’t have to come,” Stiles says.   
Derek does that eye thing, equal measures sour and bored, to indicate how far above this conversation he is.   
“Why did you?”  
“Why did I what?”  
“Why did you come?”  
“Though you’d probably suffocate in your own vomit,” Derek says.   
Stiles rolls his eyes: “not my first rodeo.”  
Derek runs a hand through his hair. The moon has turned the black of it into the kind of oil on rainwater blue.  
“Aren’t you too young to drink?” he asks.   
Stiles laughs. He laughs and laughs and doesn’t want to stop, but he runs out of air. Because wouldn’t that be something.  
“Do you drink?” he asks, finally.  
Derek shakes his head.   
“Why not?”  
“Doesn’t really work, just makes us feel like shit immediately.”  
“Kind of like Eskimos?”  
Derek shrugs.   
Stiles rolls and sits up.   
“Where’s Laura?” he asks.   
“At the loft.”  
“With Peter?”  
Derek shrugs.  
“Isn’t that weird? Isn’t he going to sense something is off?”   
Stiles’ level of understanding of werewolf and alpha powers is still limited, but he’s decided to err on the side of caution, and just assume that they’re creepy to the level of psychic. Or the other way around.   
Derek shakes his head: “Laura’s made her peace with it. And she has a very good handle on … herself. She was always meant to be alpha, never Peter.”  
“Don’t you want to be alpha?” Stiles asks.   
“No.”  
Stiles looks at Derek then, at the sharpness of his features under the pale moon; at the shimmer of his eyes, magical even sans shift. He’s looking out of the window, into the middle distance, and there’s a certain serenity on his hard to read face that Stiles isn’t sure he’s ever seen there before.   
“Good. That’s good,” Stiles offers unnecessarily. Because that’s him. Master of the unnecessary. 

Derek blinks and pulls his gaze back into the moment, it snags on Stiles’ face, and they get stuck staring at each other. Stiles blinks with the intensity. Feels it cloud his mind.   
Derek tilts his head at that, let’s a little bit of beta blue bleed into his irises. He’s using whatever mojo he has on Stiles again, Stiles is sure. It warms the stupid in Stiles’ blood, near the surface from the booze as is. Wraps around him like a heavy scent of summer flowers, scrapes his skin like the hot breeze of a desert wind. Stiles’ fingers twitch on the floorboards. The tip of his tongue swipes a stripe over his lower lip.   
Derek’s nostril’s twitch and he leans a fraction closer. 

It’s Stiles who closes the distance. He pivots on his steady, sweaty palm, pressed into the floor next to Derek’s knee, and scrambles to hover over Derek awkwardly, straddling his feet on his knees. It’s Stiles who pushes up, balancing his other hand on the cool surface of Derek’s leather jacket, and presses his lips against Derek’s.   
Derek doesn’t really respond, he just sits there, let’s Stiles rub across his mouth, lick against the seam of his lips.   
Stiles is about to pull back, when Derek uncurls.   
Seems to make a decision.   
He pushes back; rises against Stiles like a wave. Crowds into his space, takes over, until Stiles is on his ass, Derek leaning over him, clutching with both hands. A set of strong finger wrapped around the base of his scull, another on his jaw. Kissing with teeth and tongue and determination. It melts into Stiles, stirs in his guts, spreads like a virus. He’s at half chub in his jeans, grabbing greedy handfuls of Derek’s jacket to pull him closer.   
Until Derek stops. He closes his mouth and uses the hand on the back of Stiles’ neck to pull them apart.   
Stiles makes a weak, protesting: “ng,” noise, then a futile attempt at glomming back on.   
“What.” Stiles says, sounding pathetic and raspy. A ravaged cliché.   
“We’re not doing this right now,” Derek says. He doesn’t sound ravaged, but his eyes flicker back and forth between their normal kaleidoscope of colors and the electric wolf-blue. His lips are shiny with Stiles’ spit.   
“We’re not?” Stiles asks. Just to be sure.   
Derek shakes his head.   
“Like, not right now or not at all?” Stiles insists. Because details are important. That’s where the devil lives, he’s been told. And surely werewolves are the devil’s area of expertise.  
“How about we talk about it after tomorrow,” Derek says. In uncharacteristic optimism, he doesn’t articulate the: “if there’s anyone around to be having this conversation,” for which Stiles is grateful.  
“Okay,” Stiles says dumbly. Touches his fingertips to his own lips.   
“Yeah man, that sounds reasonable,” he adds.  
Derek’s mouth twitches briefly, a light uptick in the corner.   
“Go to sleep, Stiles.”

*

It doesn’t go as planned. 

It doesn’t go horribly to shit either. And Scott doesn’t die. Neither does Derek. Or Laura.   
Peter does. So in a sense it does go as planned. Stiles should be happy.  
Except Derek’s an alpha now.   
Apparently. Stiles hasn’t seen him yet. The way Scott tells it, it was a kill or be killed moment, and Derek couldn’t wait for Laura to get over to them to deliver the final blow. Bite. Scratch. Whatever. Stiles doesn’t really want to know the finer mechanics of werewolf on werewolf murder.  
“Um … is Laura pissed, is she going to like … have to kill Derek now, for the throne or whatever?” Stiles asks.   
There’s a door banging on the other end of the phone call, and voices. Because Stiles hasn’t seen Scott yet either. They’re all at the loft. Having some sort of a werewolfy debriefing that they’re not inviting Stiles to.   
“What? No, listen, I have to go.”  
“Scott, Scotty, hold on, are you sure you’re ok? Do you wanna come crash here? I can pick you up.”  
“No Stiles, it’s fine. I’ll see you later.”  
Scott hangs up.  
Stiles pushes the phone into his pocket with a shaky hand.   
It could have gone worse, he thinks. He’s reasonably sure.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> meet the new alpha

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> greetings from S2E3 19:10

“So, what happened?” Stiles asks as they’re walking out of Harris’ class. He’s been – fruitlessly – trying to ask Scott this same question all day. But Scott was late in the morning, and in detention during lunch; Coach screamed at Stiles for whispering in Econ, and Harris, well … Stiles isn’t too proud to admit he didn’t even try during Harris. There are only so many detentions a man can spend with Harris.   
“I told you,” Scott says: “it got kind of close, Peter threw Laura into a tree pretty hard, there was this sick crack, man. So she stayed down, and Derek roared like he though she was dead, and jumped on Peter.”  
Scott hadn’t actually told any of this to Stiles, but whatever.  
“So he’s the alpha,” Stiles clarifies.  
“Right.”  
“And what about Laura?”  
“What about her?”  
And Stiles loves Scott, he does, but the guy is slow.   
“How does she feel about it?”  
“What do you mean? Peter is dead, she is fine.”  
Stiles sighs: “Scotty, first of all, you just said there was a sick crack. Second, she was always meant to be alpha, don’t you think she might have hard feelings? How is any of this your definition of fine?”  
“But they’re brother and sister, they’re twins,” Scott says, and never mind, Stiles loves him even if he’s slow.  
“I don’t think they’re actually twins,” he can’t help but mentioning though.  
“They’re not?”  
Stiles is back to wanting to pull out his hair: “focus, Scotty, what happened next, how did Derek actually turn into an alpha?”  
“I don’t know dude, he just slashed Peter’s throat. Then he stood up and his eyes flashed red, and he said “I’m the alpha now.”” Scott is puffing out his chest for the “I’m the alpha” bit, which is precious.  
“Huh, that’s … anticlimactic.”  
Scott shrugs. Stiles briefly wonders if Scotty knows what anticlimactic means.  
“And then?”  
“I don’t know man, why do you care so much? Derek and Laura kind of spent a moment hugging or something, like pressing their faces together, and then we had to deal with Peter’s body.”  
They’re walking through the crowded hallway now, so Stiles has to keep it down, can’t really read Scott’s face for extra information, but he still asks: “what did you do with it?”  
“Laura and Derek dealt with it, look I have to go meet Allison.”  
There’s something about how Scott describes the whole situation that keeps stuttering in Stiles’ mind, but he can’t quite pin it down. 

The sun blinds him for a moment, as they push through the doors. The courtyard is noisy. For the first time in who knows how many months Stiles wants to say it’s cheerful.   
They did it.   
They actually did it.   
Peter is dead.   
Scott is safe.   
His dad is safe.   
He’s not entirely sure what it means that Derek’s the alpha, but it doesn’t appear imminently terrible.   
“Does he look any different?” Stiles asks, even though he doesn’t want to.   
He’s bracing himself for a weird look, but instead Scott stumbles to a stop next to him.   
There’s a sleek black Camaro idling at the curb. A tinted window rolls down and Stiles can see for himself.   
Derek is wearing a pair of mirrored metal aviators and there’s a supernaturally - no really, there is nothing natural about that toothy smile – hot, blonde chick sitting in the passenger seat; curls spilling everywhere. Stiles is so used to Laura sitting there that he almost turns around to ask Scott if he’s absolutely, 100% sure that Derek becoming an alpha didn’t come with a cage match between the Hale siblings. Because there is a buxom blonde where bony fingered, hawk-eyed Laura Hale should be. But he can’t, because in the next moment Derek smiles, and Stiles feels like shielding his eyes all over again. It’s a brilliant, violent thing, splitting Derek’s face; showcasing rows of perfect, lethal teeth.   
Stiles is just kind of standing there, thumbs in his backpack straps, blinded and stupefied. Or maybe just stupid.   
He’s pulled out of it, marginally, when Scott’s suddenly scrambling into the backseat and the engine’s revved hard.  
“You too,” Derek says.   
“What,” Stiles offers weakly.   
“Get in.”   
The bombshell is making eyes at Stiles over Derek’s shoulder. Stile’s doesn’t really want to. The eyes are scary. The amount of teeth in that car is not exactly reassuring either. His jeep is right here; he could easily follow them. Or he could say he will follow them, and drive home like a sane person. But Scott’s in that god damned car. Although didn’t he just say he needed to go meet Allison? The unidentifiable thing that bothered Stiles easrlier now materializes. Because Scott said ‘they’ had to deal with Peter’s body. And then he said that Laura and Derek did. Scotty lumped himself into a ‘we’ with the Hales. Which … was not the plan.   
Stiles shuffles his feet.  
“Get. In,” Derek says and rolls up the window.   
Stiles gets in. 

 

The central locks click ominously, when he closes the door, and Stiles is feeling claustrophobic enough to need a moment for his panic-control breathing. In two three four. Hold two three four. Out two three four. Scott’s just sitting there, looking eager, as if this was a normal thing for him to be sitting in a Hale car, about to be driven off god knows where. The bombshell twists in her seat, pointing all of her … all of her everything at Stiles, looks at him in a way that leaves him feeling slightly dirty.   
“I’m Erica,” she says. “Erica Hale.”  
“I can see the family resemblance,” Stiles mutters, thinking of the teeth.   
Erica laughs. She does it the same way Laura does it, throwing her head back and opening her mouth wide. It sounds different though, higher, shriller.   
“I’m a Hale by bite, not by blood, little man,” she says, when she’s done laughing at him, and boy, Stiles though he hated when Laura and Derek call him kid, but no, nope, that’s actually fine.   
He stares daggers at the back of Derek’s head and wonders if Derek is banging Erica by-bite Hale. Then gets angry at himself for wondering that. Then wonders if they’ll ever get to have that “conversation” they were supposed to have. Now that they are the people still alive to be having it. 

Derek drives too fast, breaks too hard and cuts corners.   
“Hey,” Stiles snaps at the third red light: “fragile human cargo here.”  
“Wear a seatbelt,” Derek says.  
Stiles feels like baring his own blunt teeth, but yanks on the belt. Thinks of pestering Derek for where they’re going, but changes his mind. An unnamable gut feeling makes Derek seem vaguely unpesterable now. He tries to communicate with Scott through a series of elaborate hand-eye gestures, but Scott just looks more and more confused with every following one. And then they’re there. Wherever there is.

Derek parks in front of what looks like one of the old manufacturing buildings, and walks across the lot without saying anything or waiting for anyone to catch up.  
“Where are we?” Stiles quietly asks Scott, even though he knows all of the wolves can hear him.   
“The loft,” Scott says.   
And what. This is where Derek lives? It looks like a health hazard. When Stiles heard “the loft” he always imagined something fashionable. Inhabitable at least. But he supposes it makes sense for wolves to not need many close neighbors.   
In all fairness, it looks less like a tetanus infection waiting to happen on the inside. There’s a functioning industrial elevator that takes them up and leaves them faced with a heavy metal door, which Derek effortlessly slides open. And on the inside there’s voices and music, and Stiles can smell actual pizza. The furniture is kind of sparse, but there is some – he can see a corner of a couch, a huge dining table but no chairs, a chest, and a bookcase. There’s a Spartan kitchen stretching against one of the narrower walls right next to the front door. It doesn’t look like anyone ever uses it for anything but tap, coffee and fridge. But Laura is sitting on one of the kitchen counters, back against the window, legs bent at the knee, wearing blue jeans, a white tank top and woolly socks of all tings. Stiles has never seen her in anything but black or gray.   
“Hey kid,” she waves at Stiles. She looks tired, but otherwise fine. Her long hair is in a messy bun and she’s eating a banana. It’s surreal. In Stiles’ mind she only eats raw bunnies. With fur and entrails.  
“You’re wearing colors,” Stiles blurts, and Laura throws her head back to laugh. Apparently Scott was right. She really is fine. Stiles is mildly peeved at himself for needing to be reassured of that.  
“Come on,” she says, hopping down from the counter.

They walk around the corner and Stiles sees a lot more people than he was expecting. Derek is sitting on the metal staircase leading up, up, somewhere up. Laura walks over to lean against the wall next to him. Scott is sitting unnervingly close to Lahey on the couch Stiles could see from the door. Erica by-bite is sitting on a large black dude on another couch. Next to them is a prissy looking guy with over-groomed eyebrows. Stiles just stops where he is - somewhat in the room, but not entirely. He has no idea what Scott and him are doing here, albeit Scott doesn’t seem to be sharing his reserve. 

“Right,” Derek says without raising his voice or standing. Everything goes hushed, and all of the wolves, because Stiles suddenly realizes that yes, he is the only, squishy, tasty, breakable human in a loft full of werewolves, turn towards the alpha.   
“Peter’s dead, thanks for helping,” Derek says.

The man’s a beautiful, beautiful speaker, really. 

He stands up slowly then, unnecessarily; he’s got all of the attention, and walks over to Laura. Stiles looks more closely. He though Derek didn’t seem all that different, in the car, apart from the scary smile. But now that he’s paying attention, there are subtle changes. Derek seems taller somehow, broader. He seems to take up more space and his eyes, even without the shift, seem more alert. There’s a cadence in his voice that Stiles doesn’t think was there before. A luring, lulling thing that makes something in Stiles’ head scream “trap!” Derek expands, and the weird mojo that Stiles swears is a thing, because Derek’s whammied him with it more than once now, seems to form an impenetrable force field around him. It moves with him, like a bubble of light, turning heads, pulling gazes. It almost seems to make his wolves’ faces glow. Like … like the moon. 

Stiles swallows.   
Scratches the back of his neck.   
Retreats a tiny step, and hides the faint tremors that’ve picked up in his fingers behind his back. 

“It can bring interest from outside, when there’s an alpha change. Even though this has been Hale land for generations, and the succession has gone from Hale to Hale. So we don’t foresee much trouble,” Derek inclines his head towards Laura, clearly encompassing her in the “we”.  
“But just in case, we meet here every Thursday, same time. I need to know what’s going on.”

Bossy. Also rude. No please. No nothing. And Stiles still has no idea what he’s doing here.   
Laura sort of leans against Derek and they exchange a glance. Derek pinches the bridge of his nose, sighs, then adds in monotone: “these are Erica, Boyd and Jackson, they’re pack.”  
Stiles supposes its for his and Scott’s benefit. Scott is actually doing his “hey man” wave at the big black dude, who Stiles assumes is Jackson. Which means that manicured eyebrows is Boyd. What a stupid name for someone with such pretty eyebrows.   
“Scott, you keep an eye on the Argents.”  
Stiles is staring at Scott, desperately trying to decide what he should be hoping for here. A bright, shiny “fuck you” from Scotty to the Alpha in the middle of his cave … his den … his loft, or meek acceptance. He hasn’t gotten far, decision wise, when Derek adds:  
“Stiles, you keep an eye on weird stuff turning up at the Sheriff’s.”  
Stiles opens his mouth to protest, to ask Derek, who died and made him king, but then he remembers that Peter did, and that actually, kind of, in fucked up wolf terms, did make Derek king. So he closes his mouth.  
Laura’s sort of leaning on Derek again, but Derek shrugs it off and stomps up the stairs with metronomic metal clangs.   
Awesome. Great talk, Stiles thinks.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> orgasm for Stiiiiiileees.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More greetings from S2E3, 37:39 this time. Thus, I recommend listening to Woodkid's Iron from the “I can hear your heart Stiles,” line onwards. For maximum impact :)
> 
> Also this fic seems to be turning into an Encyclopedia of Derek Hale's smiles. 
> 
> Derek continues to be weird, but in a really toppy and hot way, so what are you gonna do, 'eh.

Stiles wasn’t planning on doing Derek’s bidding. He wasn’t. Because Derek might be the king of the wolves in Beacon Hills, but Stiles is not a wolf.   
But then he started thinking that it wouldn’t exactly be a bad idea for him to know if any of the calls coming in to the Sheriff’s station were of the “supernatural horror” variety. It’s not like Derek had asked him for state secrets or anything. It was more like Derek was trying to be the Sheriff’s monster-adjacent, completely illegal equivalent.   
Armed with that beautiful twist of logic, and a Tupperware container of chicken salad, Stiles drives over to the station.  
He finds his dad standing in front of the whiteboard in his office, hands crossed over his chest, wearing one of his contemplative but not despairing looks; studying the scribbles of multi-colored shorthand.  
“Hey daddio,” Stiles says: “lunch delivery!”  
“Oh,” his dad gives him a shrewd look: “to what do I owe the pleasure? And, skinless chicken breast, my favorite, mmm.” Stiles wonders if he should schedule a sweep of the office for saturated fats.   
“What, a son can’t bring his only dad some healthy lunch?”   
The Sheriff sits at his desk, pulls the container closer, gestures at Stiles to sit too.  
“Do you want some?” he asks.   
“Nah, I’m good.”  
The limited information Stiles is able to glean from his surreptitious glances to the white-board, indicate this to be an old case, or a series of old cases. Noting new and … bitey then.   
“So what’s up here, dad, any new and exciting crimes?”  
“You know I’m not at liberty to discuss these things with you, son.”   
“Oh come on, I don’t want details, I just want to know what the overall vibe is here, is there anything giving you a hard time?”  
Sheriff sighs, takes a bite of his salad; chews methodically: “budget cuts,” he says after swallowing. “Otherwise the usual - shoplifting, fender benders; seems that the park services have finally gotten on top of that wild animal problem we were having though.”  
Stiles releases a breath he didn’t know he was holding. Then promptly wants to kick himself for internally preening at the idea of getting to deliver good news to Derek. Pathetic. Pathetic.  
They chat for a while longer, make plans for dinner, and Stiles raises to leave. Except he doesn’t get much further than the hallway leading to the front office, because right there, in his undeniable bubble of wolf magic, is Derek Hale, removing sunglasses, tucking them into his shirt collar and leaning on the counter on both elbows.   
He smiles. It’s wide and bright; sure, with a lot of teeth, but it’s still a smile, not the man-eating grin he’s been pointing at Stiles.   
Stiles hears Andrea stutter and drop a sheaf of papers behind the counter.   
Derek keeps smiling at her, little crinkles in the corners of his eyes. He looks approachable, charming. Unthreatening. Stiles sees his lips form a question, watches him drop his gaze in something close to demure. Watches, in morbid fascination, as Derek drags a fingertip along the grooves in the counter, flicks his eyes up for a quick glance from under his eyelashes.   
He’s flirting!   
It’s fucking ridiculous.   
But it works, it obviously works; he’s not even doing it to Stiles, but there’s a hot, gooey spot growing in the pit of Stiles’ stomach. Stiles didn’t hear what Derek asked, but he can hear the ancient keyboard crack and groan under Andrea’s fingers as she’s pulling up whatever information his Wolfiness required.   
If Stiles stomps all the way to the restroom, and hides there until he can spy a black Camaro peeling out of the parking lot, well then it’s his business, and no one else’s. 

He’s thready and needy and confused as he leaves the station. Calls Scott in hopes of some quality bro time, maybe a little CoD, but it rings and rings and rings right into voicemail, as it always does, lately. He drives over to the McCall house anyway, hoping that maybe Scott is sleeping in late, but the only person clearly just woken up is Melissa, who looks at him with eyes a bit too compassionate for Stiles’ taste, when she says: “oh honey, I don’t know, I thought you guys were together, he said he’s out with friends.”  
So Stiles sits in his jeep in front on the McCall house, breathing in measured units of in-hold-out; watching the slowly building intensity of the tremors in his left hand, and drives home. 

He’s just collapsed onto his bed, earphones in, music blasting, when his window scrapes open and Derek slides in with a gust of fresh air.   
“Dude,” Stiles grouses: “in the middle of the day?”  
“Everyone on this block is at work,” Derek says, pulling the window shut behind him.   
“I don’t want to know how you know that,” Stiles mutters.   
“I can hear.” Derek says.  
“Of course you can.”  
“Why did you hide at the Sheriff’s station?” Derek asks.  
And naturally he knew Stiles was there. Heard him probably, or smelled him.   
“I was there checking on stuff, like you wanted me to, what were you doing there?” Stiles asks, instead of answering.   
“Inquiring about an old case,” Derek says, mildly. Looks at Stiles with eyes Stiles’ can’t fathom reading.   
“They’re not supposed to just give out information like that,” Stiles mutters.   
“I know,” Derek says. Smiles that same smile he used on Andrea, then shifts it into the glass shard sharp thing. Paradoxically, his voice softens into something sweeter at that. Something syrupy. Something that reminds Stiles of Peter for a second, and all of the hair on Stiles’ back stands up. Stiles realizes that this is how Derek, or maybe Derek and Laura, will rule their end of Beacon Hills. More measured, and less psychotic than Peter; but still all teeth. The realization stirs and stretches in Stiles. Unbends and starts baiting Stiles to push, push, push. 

He swallows with an audible click, sits up on the edge of his bed, because it’s suddenly wrong to be flat on his back, when there’s a predator measuring him out into bite sized chunks with his eyes.   
“I can hear your heart Stiles,” Derek says, and his voice amplifies, modulates and echoes back in on itself. It feels like a sing-song coming from all directions.   
“You sound like something that needs to run,” Derek adds: “are you going to run from me, Stiles?”   
Stiles shakes his head, presses both of his palms into the soft give of his mattress and stretches his legs out. Follows the dirty whispers in his bones urging him to turn his head and angle his neck.   
Derek stops smiling then, breathes in, loud; takes a measured step forward.   
He slowly, carefully brings up one of his hands, flicks out the claws, as if to make sure Stiles sees it happening. They’re silver pale and deadly. It’s elegant and exact; none of the haphazard fumbling and growling that happens to Scott.   
He takes another step, lets his eyes bleed red, asks: “do you like my alpha eyes, Stiles?”  
Stiles nods like puppet. Strings cut.  
Another step and Stiles can guess that Derek’s let his fangs come in, a slight bulge of his lower lip. He shudders at the soundless precision of it.  
Derek cracks his neck with the last step, twisting his head from left to right. Stopping at the menacing brow and the snarled nose of the beta shift.  
Stiles spreads his legs.  
Something pleased moves Derek’s lips to an approximation of a smirk; he pushes Stiles back with both hands, scrapes a: “good boy,” into the delicate skin of his neck with the tips of his fangs.   
Reason heats, vaporizes and leaves Stiles on the gust of his next breath. His arms wrap around Derek’s neck on their own accord and he tries to push or pull, he’s not sure, but he’s aiming for more contact.   
“I’m glad …,” Stiles starts, but Derek’s teeth are on his clavicle, while his hands are rubbing down Stiles’ sides only to rub back up again, the hem of the t-shirt hooked in his thumbs.  
“… we’re having this conversation after all,” the words kind of seep out of Stiles, quiet and inefficient. His shirt is bunched up under his armpits and Derek licks, flat-tongued, across Stiles’ nipple.   
Stiles swallows a noise.   
Derek smears a: “smell good,” into Stiles’ solar plexus, slurred by fang or tongue otherwise occupied.   
“I thought,” Stiles starts, but no, screw it, words and sentences are overrated. Instead he arches under Derek’s mouth, hands scrabbling for purchase on the back of his leather jacket that the man is incomprehensively still wearing.   
Stiles tries yanking at the jacket collar, but Derek shushes his happy trail and Stiles’ arms flop to his sides uselessly. He thunks the back of his head against the mattress a couple of times, scrambling for self-control.   
“There we go,” Derek says, placing his broad, hot palm over the denim covering Stiles’ aching dick. Stiles digs his heels in, finds purchase and pushes himself further into Derek’s hand.   
He realizes he’s chanting: “come on, come on,” when Derek’s human teeth clamp down on his side hard. That’s where all of the Hale wolves are bitten.  
“Easy, you’re ok,” Derek murmurs, licking at his own teeth marks, and pops the button on Stiles’ pants. He doesn’t bother with the zipper, just shifts his weight to the side, and pushes his hand down Stiles’ pants, closes it into a fist around Stiles’ precome slick dick.   
“Shit, fuck.”  
“You’re fine,” Derek says, teeth back to pointy, zig-zagging patterns on the tender, ticklish flesh of his side.   
Stiles really wants to object to this patronizing diagnosis, but Derek grips him tighter, twists from the wrist, flicks his thumb and Stiles comes all over Derek’s fingers and his own underwear. Seems he’s a teenager in more than just the passport after all.   
It takes him a moment, but when he regains the modicum of his brain that manages sight, Derek is on his side, leaning on one of his elbows, licking his fingers. Stiles groans, drags a pillow over his head and mutters curses into it. His dick twitches in his disgusting, slimy boxers.   
Derek pats his stomach and is then, inexplicably, standing up. He stretches his arms up above his head, flashes a narrow stripe of hairy belly, and adjusts what is a both an obvious and impressive boner through his jeans. Shakes one of his legs out. Stiles feels vindicated for a moment, then confused.   
He feebly reaches, making grabby motions at where he can see the thick outline of Derek’s dick, but Derek pulls his hips back, and steps out of reach.   
“What, why, why?” Stiles asks. Focuses, tries again: “what about you?”  
“I’m fine,” Derek says. And he doesn’t even look flushed. His face is back to its impenetrable, human-shaped perfection, eyes a prism of winter colors and gold flecks.   
“But,” Stiles protests, still sort of pointing at Derek’s dick.   
“It’ll be fine, don’t want to hurt you,” Derek says.  
And excuse me? Stiles chokes on a scoff. Because what kind of bullshit is this even.  
“Not my first rodeo,” he mutters darkly.   
And Derek let’s the manic, barbed grin take over his face, pointedly adjusts himself once more and says: “don’t compare me to your little boys and girls, kid.”  
Then leaves.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> if at first you don't succeed, push, push again, or how Stiles get's his hands ... well actually no, not his hands ... on Derek's dick.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> moar smut, before we get to the angst the captain sees ahead. there's even some fluff in this one, peanut butter flavored fluff.

“I brought you this,” is what Derek says, when Stiles steps outside the next afternoon. It’s 2 pm on a Saturday and Stiles has all intentions of going to find Scott, who is, once again, not picking up his phone, but owes Stiles some serious bro time, so Stiles can vent about what a dick Derek can be, without actually using his dick, while not actually telling Scott that the local alpha werewolf has touched his dick. It’s not like Stiles particularly wants to talk about all this dick with Scott, but he’s not exactly swimming in friends. A realization that has never bothered him before. Then again Scott used to live up to the name before.

Derek is holding out a brown paper bag.   
“Is it bourbon?” Stiles asks.  
Derek squints unhappily, but keeps his outstretched arm with the bag where it is, so Stiles sighs and takes it. Carefully opens it in case it’s a dead bunny. It’s not a dead bunny. It’s cookies, some very large peanut buttery cookies that make Stiles’ mouth water a little.   
“You brought me cookies,” Stiles observes, because he’s a little at a loss as to what else he could do at this very moment.  
“Peanut butter sandwich cookies,” Derek mutters, darkly, then adds: “you like them.” Not a question. Not an assumption. Statement of fact. Disturbingly, a correct statement of fact at that, because yes, Stiles loves all things peanut butter; but particularly adores peanut butter sandwich cookies.   
“Do I smell like peanut butter sandwich cookies?” Stiles asks.   
“Sometimes.” Derek wipes the hand he held the cookie bag with on the thigh of his black jeans, and puts his sunglasses back on.  
“Come with me,” he says, inclining his head towards the Camaro.  
“Uh, no,” Stiles says. Crosses his arms on his chest, delicious smelling sack of cookies and all.   
“Why did you bring me peanut butter sandwich cookies?” he asks instead, leaning against his door.  
Derek huffs and even though Stiles can’t see his eyes, he can see the eyebrows and is 70% sure Derek is glaring.   
“We could discuss this in the car,” Derek suggests.   
Stiles taps the heel of his Chucks against the stairs, nonchalantly opens the bag and breaks off a piece, pops its in his mouth. It’s delicious, a perfect combination of chewy, creamy and crunchy. Sweet and savory. He doesn’t really put much effort into stopping the little hum of appreciation that follows the bite.   
Derek sighs, pushes his hands into his jacket pockets and says: “I realize,” and he looks like he’s in pain, which makes Stiles think that this realization of Derek’s was perhaps Laura-induced.   
“… that I could have been … uh … more polite yesterday,” Derek finishes.  
“You realize,” Stiles echoes.   
Derek nods, sharply. The fact that Laura Hale knows any amount of information regarding Derek jerking Stiles off makes him simultaneously flush and cringe. He rubs cookie greasy fingers on his neck, where it feels like a blush is spreading. Derek is watching him, eyebrows arched high over the mirrored surfaces of the aviators, lips pressed tightly together. 

“Wait, polite? Polite? What does that even mean?” Stiles throws his hands up as his mind catches up to the rest of what Derek said, and may or may not have been implying.   
“Which part should you have been more polite about? Should you have used a napkin instead of licking your fingers clean?”  
Derek sort of sways forward at that; then catches himself, and goes back to wearily watching Stile’s.   
“Or how about you should just not have been such a dick about reciprocity? Or, hey, I know; what if, instead of insulting my entire sexual history, you could have just given a reason for why you didn’t want me to, like a normal human being.”  
“Not a normal human being,” Derek states, dry as the Gobi.   
And Stiles deflates, folds his cookie sack so none of the precious goodness falls out, and walks over to Derek’s car. It takes Derek a second to catch up, but then he’s rounding the Camaro, sliding into the driver’s seat.   
“Thank you,” he says, starting the engine, and it’s almost like he’s a real boy after all.   
“Seat belt,” he adds, like the taciturn creature of the night he really is, peeling away from the curb.  
“Still need a reason,” Stiles grouses.   
Derek grinds his teeth.   
Stiles watches the buildings whip by and become sparser.  
“You say things that make my wolf uncomfortable,” Derek finally says, every word rolling off his tongue like heavy rocks uphill.   
“I say things that make your wolf uncomfortable,” Stiles echoes, because he doesn’t even know where to begin with this. If it makes the wolf uncomfortable then doesn’t it also make Derek uncomfortable? Is this some sort of a schizoid Jekyll and Hyde thing? And if so, then what are the things that the wolf is uncomfortable with? And more importantly, how uncomfortable, exactly, is the wolf? Is it uncomfortable enough to decide to eat Stiles to increase its levels of comfort?  
“Ugh,” Stiles starts, vaguely noticing they’re driving into the preserve, which would be a really good place for the wolf to eat uncomfortable-making humans: “are you going to eat me?”  
He wasn’t planning on asking that, he wasn’t. He wanted to ask what in particular of the many, many, many tings Stiles had said were particularly annoying to the wolf, and how that had anything to do with Derek not letting Stiles near his dick.   
Derek stops the car, but leaves both of his hands on the steering wheel. It squeaks a little in his grip, but he’s not using his supernatural strength. His shoulders are tense though, and Stiles can see the tick in his jaw.  
“No,” Derek finally says, with something like regret. And even Stiles’ nonexistent self-preservation instinct is woke enough to not fling into the obvious “wow, heed the enthusiasm,” remark. Instead he decides to default back to polite, since it seems to be the theme of the day, and says “thank you.”   
He sees Derek relax at that, shoulders lowering on an exhale, hands uncurling from the steering wheel. He takes off his sunglasses and drops them on the console.  
Stiles rustles open the paper bag: “cookie?” he offers.   
And he really shouldn’t have, because his heart, his heart, is doing something horrible in his chest, and he has a difficult enough time controlling his dick around Derek, he really can’t take on the task of managing his heart as well. Because Derek blinks, soft like a child, and smiles, closed-lipped and shy, and for a second he looks young and fragile and not at all like a container for a short-fused magic wolf. 

So in a mad dash to make his heart stop doing whatever the fuck it’s doing Stiles drops the cookies, clicks himself free of seat belt and leans his hand heavy on Derek’s upper thigh.   
“Or how about a blow-job?” he says, licking his lips. They taste like sugar crumbs and peanut butter. “Less calories, you know, at least, uh … for you.” Stiles’ finesse, as always, is somewhat lacking.   
But the way Derek says “Stiles” to that, is at least 2/3 a growl; and the way his thigh muscles flex under Stiles’ hand is helping a lot in terms of moving this whole conversation from a matter of the heart to the matter of the dick, so Stiles soldiers on.  
“Come on,” Stiles says, looking Derek deep in the eyes: “come on Mr. Wolf, may I please suck Derek’s dick, I promise to be good at it.”  
As far as lines go, it’s ridiculous and cringe worthy, but the red comes in to Derek’s eyes so fast Stiles has to blink his own to fight dizziness.   
“Dangerous games,” Derek says, and his teeth are still human, but the fingers that have appeared, out of nowhere, on the back of Stiles’ neck, have conspicuous sharpness to them.  
“Not playing,” Stiles lies, leaves his mouth soft at the end of the word.   
What, sue him, so he knows his - very limited - advantages.   
Derek drags a clawed thumb over his mouth; his lower lip sticks to skin, is dragged down. Stiles sneaks a taste with the flick of his tongue. Doesn’t catch skin, but catches claw. Derek’s red eyes narrow on a sharp inhale.   
“What am I going to do with you,” Derek muses, retracts his claws, hooks the thumb in Stiles’ teeth and pries his mouth open as far as it will go. Stiles keeps his tongue back, let’s spit pool. He moves his hand still resting on Derek’s thigh towards his crotch and lowers his eyes. Because he’s working pretty hard on making what should be done with him obvious, really.  
“Move your hands,” Derek says, and it’s spit out like a curse. Stiles moves both of his hands behind his back, clasps his right wrist with his left fingers.   
His throat clicks then - a loud, obscene noise of an open mouthed swallow in an otherwise dry throat. It seems to shatter whatever control Derek was holding on to. He tears his own jeans open, one handed, the other still wrapped around Stiles’ jaw, yanks his dick through the fly and jerks his fist over it - once, twice - all angry, abrupt movements. It’s big, of course it’s big, but Stiles can’t really see much beyond the pink head, because Derek swears, and pushes Stiles’ wet mouth down on his dick. One of Derek’s hands is wrapped around the base, still, which keeps Stiles from choking completely, but there’s enough there to make him gag.  
The noise is followed by a strangled “fuck,” from above him, and Derek uses the fistful of hair on the back of Stiles’ head to lift him off, push him back down again. It’s slow, but uncontrolled; Stiles would go further down if he were in charge, but is struggling to breathe as is. There’s spit everywhere and his jaw gets sore three pushes in. Something in the center console is digging into his gut. It’s the best thing he’s felt in ages, including the orgasm Derek indignantly wringed out of him last night.   
His brain steeps in the sensations. The smell of dick, and spit on skin; the heat; the bruise Derek’s knuckles are making on his top lip and the one the head of his dick is making on the back of Stiles’ throat; the sweet sting of pulled hair every time he’s yanked up. Stiles moans, his own hips humping air, and Derek says: “fuck, fuck” again, starts screwing Stiles’ skull down faster.   
“Fuck, Stiles, are you going to come from my cock down your throat?” Derek sounds like a broken man, and Stiles realizes, equally broken, that he is, he is. So he tries to tighten his lips, include some suction, make it better for Derek with what limited control he has, and comes, untouched in his own pants.   
Derek makes a subhuman noise, slams Stiles down so hard his lip gets pinched between Derek’s knuckles and Stiles’ own teeth and a faint hint of copper mixes with the overwhelming flavor of Derek’s come.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> everything goes wrong

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ladies and gentleman (do we even have any?) please return to your seats and put on your seat belts, we will be flying through some angst for a couple of chapters. 
> 
> ok so ... angst commences, as advertised. I hope you guys don't mind it and hurt!stiles, because i really like the fact that someone is reading this and leaving kudos and feedback.   
> i like angst because i'm a bad person and like to hurt my toys.   
> or, alternatively, because instead of my own feels i prefer a controlled setting and fictional characters, because theirs is all pretty and poetic and shit, whereas mine is more of the 'oh for fuckssake what the fuck is this even, omg no, no' variety. you know how it is, i know you do.   
> so yeah, angst ahead, will last for a while.   
> love you, thanks for reading.

“Do you need a ride over to Derek’s today?” Stiles asks Scott, because this is what they do now, apparently. It’s the third Thursday after Derek became the alpha, and both Stiles and Scott are, for some reason, still going to his group therapy thing. Although, Stiles hasn’t really seen Derek lately. For more than a week, if Stiles doesn’t count last Thursday’s meeting, and Stiles might as well not count it, because it was short and moody, and Stiles had been too distracted to really remember what was said. Derek kept staring at the little, swollen knick on Stiles’ upper lip, frowning. And Stiles kept trying to find a balance between being ticked off at Derek for clamming up after what Stiles considered to be a spectacular sexual encounter, and willing away his dick chub in a room full of super sniffers. 

“Nah, you still have one period, but I’m meeting Isaac now, we’ll go over together,” Soctt says.  
Isaac. Isaac.   
Not Lahey. No, Isaac.   
“So how is that going, with Isaac,” Stiles asks, because he can’t leave well enough alone.   
Because Scott has answered 2 of the 13 phone calls Stiles has made during the past week.  
“What do you mean?” Scott is looking at Stiles, half a smile on his lips, head tilted in puzzlement. Stiles almost doesn’t ask. Almost. But 2 out of 13, man, and no comments on it either. No “hey, I saw you called a bunch of times last night, I was doing … something, I was doing something reasonable, but I care that you’re alive.” No.   
So Stiles asks: “it’s just, you’re spending a lot of time together?”   
Scott shrugs.  
“Well yeah, Isaac is great.”  
Stiles’ chest hurts enough for him to press his knuckles against bone. Because what’s left unsaid here is clearly that Stiles is not. Great. Enough.  
“Yeah, look, I don’t mean to be a dick here, but … are you, is there … I mean, you spend a lot of time together, and whenever I see the two of you, you’re all over each other.”  
Scott stares at him.   
Stiles presses forward: “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I don’t care, if there is, but … does Allison?”  
He sees Scott rubbing a hand over his neck, eyes shifty, and waits. Hopes for an explanation that would make him feel dumb, but relieved.  
“The touching thing is a wolf thing,” there’s a hardness in Scott’s eyes that makes him look mean: “you wouldn’t understand.”   
Something dim and lonely in Stiles’ heart splinters off and dissolves into his blood, darkening the stream.  
“Okay,” he mutters, but Scott’s turning away already. He tosses a careless “see you,” and walks. 

Stiles sits through his last period and the pain in his chest mutates into an angry pulse in his ears. He drives over to Derek’s early, itching for something, he doesn’t even know. A fuck. A fight. 

But Derek’s not there, Laura is. 

She ruffles his hair, rubs her long, thin fingers down his forehead. And maybe, Stiles decides, thawing, maybe Scott was right, maybe this is a wolf thing, and Stiles hasn’t been paying enough attention. Maybe if he tries a little harder, he’ll get it. He tries harder, and Scott stops drifting away. That’s how it works for him. He just needs to try harder. Harder still.

“What’s up, kid,” Laura asks, hoists herself up on the kitchen counter.   
“Nothing, nothing, I was just looking for Derek, to talk … about stuff, before the meeting,” Stiles says.  
“Uh-uh,” Laura says.   
“I … I’m gonna go, get out of your hair,” Stiles offers.  
“My hair’s fine, Stiles.”  
“It is, of course … I didn’t. It’s very pretty hair,” Stiles is sinking fast.   
“Oh for gods … I will go read on the couch. Come sit on the couch with Laura. Laura will not eat you.” Laura says. Then adds, softer, but by a hair: “you do know I can smell your come on him, right?”  
Stiles twitches; mortified or aroused, but gathers himself enough to flip Laura off, just in case. Laura laughs, slings an arm around his shoulders and steers him towards the living room with a good natured “there we go.”

“He’s,” Laura starts once they’ve settled in; Stiles sprawled in angles, laptop balanced on his belly, Laura with both feet tucked under her ass, book on the armrest.  
Stiles looks at her, demonstrates superhuman patience by not twisting his face into any of its demanding monkey expressions. But it’s a waste, because Laura shakes her head and huffs. Pushes the heel of her palm against one of her brows and just shrugs a: “look, just, stick around for a bit after, yeah? I know he’d like that.”

Derek, so much unlike himself, comes in with a cloud of noise. The sound of Boyd’s - because Stiles now knows that the stoic, solid one, is Boyd - low, rumbling laughter and the click of Erica’s heels. He can hear Jackson too, complaining about something. He can see Derek turn up his nose the moment he’s in the door, flash a red-eyed look over at him and Laura. Laura scoffs, but gets up. She moves across the floor with measured, elegant dancer steps, making Derek wait. They stare for a moment, until Laura twists her neck, then press their foreheads together. Derek’s hand is on the back of Laura’s head, fingers clutching at a thick handful of black hair. 

Scott and Isaac stumble through the door then, flushed and laughing, and the bitterness that had started dissolving in Stiles sort of snaps back, gathers and pools in his stomach.

The meeting is tense. Jackson claims that there are either more Argents or Argent associates in town, which, as per the fragile truce Derek and Chris Argent have going on, Derek should have been informed of, but hasn’t been. Derek growls, demands a confirmation from Scott. Who is unable to confirm or deny because apparently him and Allison are “taking a break.” Which Stiles has heard nothing of. But Lahey, Isaac fucking Lahey, puts a hand on Scott’s shoulder and squeezes, when Scott is speaking. Stiles grinds his teeth and sits on his left hand. Battles the oddly Peter-like voice in his head that whispers: “you have no business being angry at Scott, it’s your fault he is a werewolf and he hates being a werewolf.”   
Except how he doesn’t.   
He doesn’t seem to be hating it anymore.   
“Look, I’ll find out,” Scott says just then: “we’re not together, but we didn't like, have a fight or anything, she’d speak to me if I said I’m doing it for my pack.”

Scott McCall has joined the Hale pack, without telling Stiles.

And it’s painfully obvious, now that Stiles looks closer. When he rewinds the meeting in his head like slow motion car collision footage. Isaac and Scott are plastered against one another as is, but slowly, like hot air, like colors on an aquarelle, Stiles sees that all of the wolves in the loft have mixed. Erica scritches her hand through Isaac’s curls, then rubs that same hand over Scott’s back, winks. Jackson pushes Scott, palm broad against his forehead. Boyd nudges Scott out of his way, but leaves his arm draped around Scott’s shoulders. Stiles feels like he can see glowing handprints on Scott’s skin. Marking Scott as theirs. Marking them as his.   
Laura easily dances her fingertips on necks, shoulders and jaws. Even Derek, when he thundered past them all for his regular seat at the base of the stairs, seemed to have rubbed against or bumped into each one. 

Not Stiles though.   
Stiles is an island.   
He’s sitting cross-legged in the corner of the couch, fighting the urge to bring up his shaking fingers against the light, to make sure he’s not disappearing. 

Scott McCall has joined the Hale pack, and no one, no one told Stiles. 

So Stiles sits and stews, and he doesn’t give a fuck if the Hales don’t want him there when the meeting ends. They’re going to have to come over and tell him to leave. Better yet, physically escort him from the premises.   
He hears, more than sees people leaving, and Laura’s boots walking past.  
“I’m gonna go to the store,” she yells from the kitchen. Bangs the door as she leaves.   
“Are you OK?” Derek asks. He’s silently materialized, as he does, and the couch dips as sits.   
And no, Stiles is not OK. On multiple levels.   
“When did Scott join your pack?” Stiles demands, turning to face Derek, whose eyebrows go up, either at the question or the delivery.   
“I don’t know exactly, a while, maybe two weeks?”  
And this throws Stiles, because how can Derek not know.  
“You don’t have to lie to me, you know,” he snaps.  
Derek frowns, straightens his back: “I’m not lying,” he grumbles: “it’s not like there’s a party.”  
There’s not? Now that Stiles thinks of it, he did assume there to be some sort of a ritual. Something with kneeling in blood and sacrificing of small animals, perhaps. What, he watches a lot of TV, he’s an only child and a friendless loser.   
“Sorry,” he mumbles: “it’s just, I didn’t know.”  
Derek’s expression lightens from stormy to something lighter, but dangerously close to pity. Which Stiles absolutely doesn’t want. No.   
“Whatever,” he rushes: “what’s been up with you, I have to say I’ve been kind of hoping for a repeat performance.” Stiles tries to leer, but he’s not sure how well it works. He’s a bit too fractured to really bring his A game.   
Derek scowls, looks at where Stiles’ lip is perfectly healed. And that only makes Stiles feel worse. Like he’s not even good enough for that. Not good enough to touch.   
Because it’s a wolf thing.   
And Stiles is not a wolf.  
“I wanted to talk to you about that,” Derek says. Stands up, paces a couple steps towards the large, grimy windows, then back.   
“Okay?” A cold swirl of dread floods Stiles.   
“The bite,” Derek says: “have you given it any thought?”  
Stiles is staring at him, with his mouth open, because this was honestly the last thing he thought Derek would want to talk about, when Stiles is trying to talk about blowjobs.  
“I mean,” Derek is pacing again, clearly uncomfortable: “do you want it … when do you want it?”  
And is he … is this? Stiles rubs his fist into his eye socket.   
“It would make you pack,” Derek finishes, uncertain.   
And he is! He really is saying, what Stiles thinks he’s saying. That Stiles is not good enough for him to fuck unless he takes the bite. Because he’s not “pack”.

“You’re unbelievable, you know that?” Stiles says. He’s not even yelling. He stands, hoists up his backpack.   
“Stiles?”  
“Fuck you, Derek Hale. Fuck you and your precious pack.”

Stiles runs down the stairs like someone’s chasing him, even though no one is, because no one cares, no one cares, but his lungs feel like they’re about to collapse and he has to get as far form here as he can before it happens.  
He almost mows down Laura as he pushes through the front door. But she is running too, not stopping, her hair is wild, eyes wilder, and she roars: “what did you do?” before rushing up the stairs.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ugh, poor Stiles

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> today has kind of jerked me around a lot, so I will now drink some wine and re-watch old TW. thank you for hanging out with me. 
> 
> trigger warning, torture (not too explicit).

Stiles skips next Thursday. He skips most of the week, to be frank, because he spends as much of his time as humanly possible either drunk or high. Sometimes both. Preferably both. And once in his life Stiles seems to be lucky, because the Sheriff’s out of town for some sort of a mandatory cop training / retreat. A week of check-in calls and nothing else. He forges a note and skips class. Hides at home or in one of his old haunts, although he’s not exactly welcome there either.

He doesn’t go to the meeting, but nothing comes of it.  
No calls. No texts.  
No one gives a fuck. Not Derek. Not Scott. Not Laura

Because Stiles is an untouchable island. 

So it’s a cosmic joke really, that this is when he gets picked up for “consorting with monsters.” Picked up is an exaggeration. Stiles get’s hit over the head as he’s trying to fumble his keys into the lock on his own goddamned front door. Doused with sickly sweet chloroform from a rag over his nose and mouth, old school style; and tossed in the back of a black SUV. 

The first thing he notices when he comes to is the maddening headache, far beyond anything a bump on the head or a normal hangover warrants. Must be the chloroform. And to think there are dumbasses out there sniffing this shit for giggles. Stiles drags his hand on whatever surface it is he’s sprawled out over, it’s hard, cold and not exactly clean, feels like concrete. He still can’t smell anything beyond the cloying scent of chemicals from the rag, and the temperature in this room is neither here nor there. The cold is seeping through the stone into Stiles’ back, but he’s not freezing. He can’t hear anything or anyone. Not even when he holds his breath and focuses - no nearby trains or planes, no nightclubs, no people talking upstairs or next door. Nothing to report, should he miraculously find a way to dial 911.  
Stiles hazards to crack his eyes, sees nothing. It’s completely dark; there are no bright lines that would indicate windows.  
A basement?  
He carefully brings up his hand to check the back of his head. It doesn’t feel like he’s lying in a puddle of blood, but he might be. His headache intensifies, rolls through body, and roils in his gut. There’s a sizeable lump on the back of his head, but no blood. He feels for his phone, but of course it’s not there.  
Trying to roll to his side and get his knees under him is a mistake though, the nausea crests and Stiles throws up.  
He can’t keep crouching over his own puddle of vomit though, so he braces for more pain and more nausea, holds his breath in an attempt to lock down his core muscles and rolls away, ends up on his hands and knees. He waits for his body to adjust, breathing through his acerbic mouth, until rocking back in hopes of ending up in a sitting position seems like a thing he can do. It takes a couple of tries and there’s cold sweat all the way down his back by the time he manages.  
He’s breathing too hard to hear anything, so the harsh, cold light and the annoying buzz of fluorescents comes as a surprise. He slams his eyes shut, listens to a set of surprisingly light footsteps descend from what must be a set of stairs leading to what is probably a very well insulated door. 

“Mr. Stilinski,” a voice says. It’s a strange voice, not one he recognizes -slightly raspy and with an odd tendency of dragging some of the consonants.  
Stiles cracks his eyes, squints against the lights that feel like hot pokers in his skull.  
There’s a spry old man standing in front of him. He has shiny, rat-like eyes and veneers too larger for his sunken face, but otherwise he looks nearly harmless, cheerful even. The nausea in his stomach mixes with the frigidness of dread. Cheerful kidnappers are not good.  
“I would like you to call your alpha,” the old man says, holding up what seems to be … yep, it’s Stiles’ phone. So hunters then. Jackson was right.  
Stiles keeps squinting at him, memorizing details. Average height, so … 5’9’’, no hair, narrow face, seems to have arthritis of something close to it by the looks of his fingers, might have other health issues too, because both his head and his hands seems to shake a little.  
“We’ve taken the liberty of unlocking your phone, and I can see his contact right here, I am going to dial and you will say ‘hello’, I will then take over, understood?”  
Stiles doesn’t say anything.  
“Mr. Stilinski, I need you to indicate you understand. I don’t necessarily want to hurt you, but we need Mr. Hale to join us, and we will get that even if we do need to hurt you.”  
“I don’t have an alpha,” Stiles says with bile coated mouth.  
The old man steps up, looks closer at Stiles: “interesting,” he says: “let’s call anyway.”  
He connects the call, flips it on speaker. The tinny sound of it ringing burrows into Stiles’ aching brain. It digs deeper and deeper, because no one picks up. As Stiles knew they wouldn’t.  
“Hm,” the old man says: “how disappointing, the alpha has surely had enough time to notice you are missing, not much of an alpha is he?”  
“How long have I been here?” Stiles asks.  
“Oh not long, about 8 hours.”  
No wonder Stiles has a hangover from hell; they must have dosed him multiple times.  
“Chloroform in dangerous you know, I could have slipped into a coma,” Stiles says.  
“Very true.” The old man smiles a skeletal smile with his oversized veneers.  
“Let’s try the young beta McCall then, shall we,” he says and despite his aching head and his cramping stomach Stiles bursts out laughing, because how’s that for a phone call that will never get picked up.  
“Ah,” the old man says over the ringing phone: “perhaps we did overdose you. No matter, slight brain damage is fine for our purposes.”  
He drops Stiles’ phone on the ground and steps on it with a heavy crunch of a boot when no one picks up.  
“Your contacts seem to betray you, Mr. Stilinski, so I’m afraid we will have to go with plan B.”  
He kicks Stiles in the gut. Then in the ribs when Stiles falls over, gasping for air. He does it a couple of times.

The next time Stiles wakes up he’s no longer on the floor, but lying on what feels like a link of metal fence, or a bed frame, hands bound above his head, legs spread and bound. The old man’s face is unnervingly close to his, feeding him sips of water from a bottle. Stiles’ throat locks on that, because he’s a sheriff’s kid, he knows what this means, if they’re feeding him they are planning on keeping him. Both alive and here for a while.  
“Welcome back Mr. Stilinski. You really should look into a healthier lifestyle, a man your age should be able to take more.”  
He caps the bottle and tosses it aside. Brings out a thick leather strap and pushes it between Stiles’ teeth, clasps it behind his head.  
“Here’s what were going to do,” he says: “we are going to test out your little pack’s connections. It’ll also be a wonderful way for you to learn how we usually restrain wolves. You see, if you keep a little electricity running through them it takes away their powers. No strengths, no healing.”  
Stiles realizes he’s not wearing any clothes and there are wires attached to his sides and his thighs. Panic unmoors him, makes him forget all the “stay calm” reason he’s learned by reading his dad’s files. Tears prickle his eyes and he desperately, pathetically tries to speak through the leather between his teeth, pulls on his restraints.  
“For you it’s just going to be pain though, the Chileans call this parilla,” the old man says, rolling his R-s with gusto, moving away, picking up a forked thing with a wooden handle.  
“This is a bare electrode,” he says, pointing at the two prongs with a crooked index finger.  
“The wires we’ve attached to your body would normally go around your penis for maximum pain, perhaps into your urethra even, but you’ll forgive me for not being interested in your penis. Also, given what I’ve seen so far, we can inflict enough pain for your threshold without the crassness of sexual assault.”  
Stiles starts thrashing, but the old man calmly talks over him.  
“I have an electrical unit here, and some dials to adjust voltage. How much do you think it’s going to take for your pack to feel that you’re in distress?”  
Stiles wails, tries to explain that no one will come for him because he’s not in the pack, but it all gets tangled in the strap, and the man shushes him, touches the prod to his chest. 

Stiles screams. 

They do that a lot.  
The man prods him with electricity and Stiles screams as pain pierces the flesh both where the electrode touches and where the wires are attached.  
Stiles gets lost in intermittent darkness and the fluorescent blue, because the old man leaves and returns. He gets lost in the old man’s increasing agitation, when none of the wolves comes for Stiles. His voice breaks after a couple times, so from then on he screams in silent rasps and wheezes. 

His body still jerks and flinches every time the door opens and the lights flick on. The human being really is an appallingly resilient creature. Because it’s hope that flinches like this. But Stiles has stopped opening his eyes. 

There’s a lot more noise in his dungeon than usual though. More than one pair of feet rushing on the concrete, furniture being turned over. Then someone is yanking at the straps on Stiles’ ankles and wrists, the raw skin burning at that touch.  
“Jesus Christ,” someone is muttering angrily, undoing the leather strap and pulling it out of Stiles’ mouth.  
“Here, kid, drink,” a bottle of vaguely lemony flavored liquid is pushed to his lips.  
“Can you find him some pants?” the person holding his head up says.  
There are loose pants being tugged on and the man, who gave Stiles the drink, because it’s a man, is saying: “can you lift your arms?” and absurdly, Stiles can, so a baggy t-shirt is pulled over his head. The soft cotton hurts his skin, and his teeth are shattering. Shock. Maybe cold. Probably both.  
“Mr. Argent?” Stiles tries to ask with his cracked lips and his silenced voice.  
“Look, kid,” Chris Argent says: “I’m really sorry OK, and we’re dealing with Gerard, we had no idea he had you, I promise you that.”  
Stiles slits his eyes, looks at Christ Argent’s haggard face. Believes him, doesn’t really care either way.

They drive him home in a black SUV that looks very much like the one that brought him there. Christ Argent walks him to the door, hand on his elbow. Stiles’ knees buckle on every step, but he makes it.  
“Stiles,” Christ Argent says, digging their spare key out from under the potted plant. Stiles really needs to find a better place for it.  
“Why isn’t anyone looking for you?”


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> hurt!stiles

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> run baby, run baby, run baby, run
> 
> oh and this is definitely gonna be longer than 13 chapters
> 
> also i feel like this fic is eating my life now

“Stiles? Stiles?!”  
The yelling from downstairs slowly permeates the thick gloop separating Stiles from consciousness. Maybe he was sleeping; maybe it’s the brain damage Gerard-whoever promised.  
Stiles tries to pull down the covers and turn to face the door, but his limbs are not coordinating.  
“Stiles? Are you here? Your car is here so you better be here, and you better have a good explanation for this! I’ve been calling! I was this far from sending a patrol car,” his dad bangs in through the door with heavy steps and agitated breaths.  
“Stiles? Son?”  
Stiles manages to shrug a shoulder.  
“Stiles, are you OK?” the sheriff’s voice goes from irritated to frantic and he’s peeling the covers back, turning Stiles, his worried eyes searching for evidence of harm. There shouldn’t be much, Stiles thinks. Gerard never hit him in the face, he only kicked him in the ribs on that first day, so he probably has some bruises, but those are hidden under Christ Argent’s shirt. Hopefully it doesn’t say Hunter’s Unite on it. Otherwise it’s just the lack of voice, perhaps a busted lip. Potential brain damage. Maybe he won’t notice.  
“What happened?” his dad’s hands are shaking: “Stiles, son, who did this, what happened?”  
“It’s OK, dad,” Stiles tries to say and his dad recoils from the broken, splintered noise he makes.  
“Ok, I’m taking you to the hospital,” his dad proclaims, hides the thumb he quickly wipes his eyes with.  
Stiles finds some of his strength at the threat of hospital, grabs his dad’s hand and frantically shakes his head. Because hospital means Melissa McCall and Melissa McCall means Scott. And Stiles doesn’t want Scott to be forced to pretend he cares.  
“Stiles,” the sheriff whispers, swallows an emotion: “Stiles, son, I don’t know what happened to you, but we are going to the hospital.”  
“I’m fine, please, I just need a little rest, that’s it, please, I don’t want to go to BH Memorial,” Stiles pleads in a rush of air more than anything vocal.  
“Okay son, okay,” his dad says, because he’s been in the force for a long time, and he can hear what’s not being said: “no BH Memorial, we’ll drive to Sacramento.”  
And Stiles deflates at that, nods his head yes, lets his dad bundle him into a hoodie and the passenger seat of the car. Lets his dad drive an hour - because he’s speeding that’s why - to Sutter Memorial’s emergency center. Clutches the pillow his dad remembered to grab, drifts in and out.

His dad doesn’t ask any more questions, he just sits with Stiles, a warm hand on his shoulder or his knee, as they wait. He looks at Stiles with sad eyes, when Stiles rasps: “got into a fight,” at the nurse’s question. Nods his head yes, when the doctor asks if they need a rape kit.  
“Dad, no,” Stiles tries to assure him: “nothing like that happened.”  
But sheriff presses his lips into a thin, pale line; and doesn’t tell the doctor to scrap the kit.  
“Sorry son,” he says, when the examination comes back negative: “but you’re not telling me anything, and this,” he points at the band of bruises and abrasions on his wrists: “is not a fight.”  
Stiles can’t fault him for that. He doesn’t care anyway. It’s fine.

The leave three hours later with a diagnosis of:  
\- bruised ribs, three;  
\- second degree burns on his sides, two;  
\- cuts and contusions on both of his wrists and ankles;  
\- bruises around his mouth;  
\- dehydration and,  
\- vocal cord damage. 

Stiles thinks it’s not that bad, given everything. He’s not a 100% on his electro torture research, but he’s pretty sure he could have nerve damage, myelopathy or intracranial hemorrhage. The sheriff doesn’t seem to agree. His face flickers between livid, then aghast, then livid again. He looks like he wants to shake Stiles, or wrap him in bubble wrap, and never ever let him out of the house. Which Stiles would be fine with. Both are fine. It's fine, really.  
The nurse tells Stiles to take it easy for a week to let his ribs heal, and he’s to be on complete vocal rest for a month.  
“I want you to press charges,” the sheriff says when they’re back in the car.  
Stiles shakes his head, tries to put the pointlessness and impossibility of the task into the gesture.  
Sheriff sighs. Squeezes the steering wheel until his knuckles turn white.  
“We’re talking about this again,” he says, more to himself, it seems, than to Stiles: “when you feel better.”  
Stiles rests his head against the window.  
“I want you to go back to seeing Dr. Bennett, when you get your voice back,” his dad adds. Stiles acquiesces with a nod. He used to see Dr. Bennett after … well he saw Dr. Bennett for a while, when he was ten. Dr. Bennett is good people.  
“Son,” his dad starts, but doesn’t finish, shakes his head, pats Stiles on the knee. Stiles would feel like the world’s biggest asshole, he would. But he doesn’t. Feel anything. Which is fine. His dad will be fine. It’s fine. Because whatever else it was that Gerard’s parrilla accomplished, it seems to have stubble burned the insides of Stiles chest. It’s dark and hollow now, an echo chamber for that one, adamant thought: “it’s fine.” And hey, his left hand’s not shaking anymore. 

He lounges on the downstairs couch, stares vacantly at either the TV or out of the window, taps his knuckles on his hollow chest. “I’m a drum,” he thinks, indifferently, on the third day. “Drums are meant to be beaten.” At least Stiles is no longer untouchable.  
His dad asks him if he wants to talk about it every night, when thrashes out of his bed, blind and deaf with fear. And every night, after he’s calmed down, Stiles points at his mouth and his throat, like he feels bad he can’t. 

“It’s the McCalls,” his dad says, looking at the screen on the landline.  
Stiles shakes his head, actually clasps his hands in front of him in supplication. His dad looks lost, so lost, and beaten.  
“So, no Scott?” he hedges.  
Stiles shakes his head.  
“Did he do this?”  
Stiles shakes his head again.  
“Does he know who did this?”  
Stiles shakes his head.  
“I have to tell him something,” his dad mumbles: “he’ll just keep calling.”  
Stiles seriously doubts that. It must show on his face, because his dad grimaces, picks up, says: “yeah, he can’t come to the phone right now, he’s sick.”  
Stiles tunes it out, focuses on the empty echoes in his chest. 

He does make a decision by the end of that first week though.  
“I want to leave BH,” he scribbles on his whiteboard, holds it up for his dad to see.  
“Stiles,” his dad sighs; plaintive, hopeless.  
Stiles erases the first sentence with the side of his palm, and writes a new one.  
“evrthn important done @ school, doing stuff by email for a month anyway. I can just do it by email for longer,” he writes, waits for his dad to read, watches him cross his arms on his chest.  
So Stiles erases and writes: “it's not like I will miss out.”  
“But where,” his dad starts.  
And that means he’s thinking about it.  
“I decided on UCLA,” Stiles writes.  
“But you got into Berkley,” his dad protests.  
Because stupidly, Stiles had only applied to schools in California.  
“Full ride UCLA,” Stiles writes and rolls his eyes.  
His dad’s face sets in grim determination: “listen, Stiles, we can make Berkley happen,” he says. Which they can’t.  
“want to go to UCLA,” Stiles writes in a furious scrawl.  
Sheriff wipes a hand over his face, makes a broad “continue” gesture.  
“want to go to LA now, find a room thru Craigslist, get job, will move into the dorms in Aug.”  
“Stiles I’m not letting you move to LA on your own.”  
“I’d be there on my own for college,” the marker Stiles is using whines against his whiteboard.  
“And you need to recover,” his dad argues.  
Stiles drops the whiteboard, hunches his shoulders. Whatever.  
It’s fine.  
It’s fine.  
He vaguely hears his dad sigh, mutter something Stiles can’t quite catch under his breath, leave the room. 

 

“Listen, son,” his dad says, when he comes back a couple of hours later: “something really bad clearly happened, and I don’t know where Scott is, or if I should be arresting him, and you’re not talking to me. So I understand that you may not want to be here, but you are my son, and you are hurt.”  
Stiles watches his dad pace, pinch the bridge of his nose, look around, lost, hoping for someone else to come bail him out of this conversation. And Stiles realizes with a sudden flash of clarity that this is what the sheriff’s been hoping for the past 7.5 years. For someone to show up and bail him out of their conversations.  
“So I just can’t, I can’t let you move to LA on your own, OK?” his dad looks at him, blue eyes watery and imploring. Stiles looks away. Taps his knuckles on his chest.  
Pa rum pum pum pum  
Ra pum pum pum  
Ra pum pum pum  
“But,” his dad says: “I have a proposition for you. If you are willing to stay with your grandmother in Riverside until college AND you agree to see a therapist there, then you can go.”  
Stiles nods. Doesn’t think about it, doesn’t scribble out any questions, and the look on the Sheriff’s face says he was very much expecting he would. Because Stiles’ grandmother is weird, ok? And they’ve never been close. Even the sheriff’s not that close to his mother. Sure, they see each other for Christmas or Thanksgiving, they send cards, but she’s essentially a stranger. A stranger, who smells weird, wears too much makeup and smokes in the house.  
“Okay,” he says.  
Stiles nods again, writes “pack now, go tmrw?” on his whiteboard.  
His dad clenches his fists, opens his mouth, but closes it with a click. Shakes his head. Whispers a splintered: “Christ, son, I wish you’d tell me what happened.”  
Stiles holds up his question. 

It’s fine. It’s fine. 

Pa rum pum pum pum  
Ra pum pum pum  
Ra pum pum pum

“Yes, ok, I’ll call her again, we’ll pack now, drive tomorrow.”


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stiles meets his grandmother, Magda Stilinska, who is not what Stiles expected. Oh and Lydia Martin

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> would you look at that ... there's sparkiness in this story after all. 
> 
> also Lydia Martin. 
> 
> Peace out for the weekend, more on Monday. Love you, thank you so much for the comments and the kudos.

Magda Stilinska is actually a really nice person to be living with, Stiles realizes. She doesn't ask questions Stiles doesn’t want to answer. In fact, she asks very few questions over all, which Stiles, as a man with a whiteboard, is grateful for. She makes him bitter, purplish tea every evening, which leaves Stiles woozy, but mutes his dreams into horrors he can wake from - sweaty and crying - but not half crazed and not flinging himself out of the window like he was back home. She starts smoking outside because of Stiles’ vocal cords, and she mediates the daily phone call Stiles gets from his father in a way that requires minimal participation from Stiles.  
“He is fine,” Magda says, looking at Stiles with shrewd eyes, echoing the sentiment bouncing in the void that is Stiles’ chest.  
“He misses you too,” she says without confirming with Stiles.  
“Hm, let me ask,” she does say one day, then gives Stiles a piercing look, mutes her phone and inquires: “do you wish for your friends from Beacon Hills to be able to reach you?” The way she says “friends” drips with something that makes hair stand on Stiles’ arms. Stiles shakes his head no. Wonders who, for a passing moment, then taps his knuckles over his barren chest, doesn’t care.   
“No, he does not,” Magda conveys. There’s an agitated avalanche of words on the other side, which Magda let’s flow over her, face impassive as much as her extravagant mask of make-up allows.  
“Syn, you worry too much,” she finally says: “we’re fine.”  
And Stiles looks at her, really looks at the sharp black eyebrows, mostly drawn on skin, at the bright coral lipstick bleeding into the creases around her mouth, at the way her fingers twitch, rings clinking, missing their cigarette. They’re fine.   
Magda is fine too.  
“Yes, he’s going tomorrow,” Magda is saying now, and Stiles realizes his month of vocal rest must be up. So he’s seeing a doctor about his vocal cords and meeting his new therapist. Joy.

There’s a black mini cooper in front of Magda’s house when Stiles gets back from his appointments. He’s supposed to talk now, not a lot, but he's supposed to use his full voice. "No whispering, no screaming," the doctor says.  
No screaming. No screaming.  
Something ticks in the dark sides of Stiles’ hollow chest, tries to ooze out of the crevices.   
“I’m fine,” Stiles says to himself. A scraped voice used out loud for the first time in over a month. Not screaming. Not whispering.  
Taps his chest.  
Pa rum pum pum pum  
Ra pum pum pum  
Ra pum pum pum

“Oh, hello.” There’s a startlingly sensual-looking woman standing in Magda’s living room. She’s wearing a leather miniskirt and her waist-length cinnamon hair is spilling everywhere. She taps what looks like an expensive suede boot, when Stiles fails to take her outstretched hand. Stiles stares at the black nailpolish, at the ornate double finger ring that looks like a dragon or a lizard, hedges a step back, can’t quite bring himself to shake her hand.  
“Oh,” the redhead says again, lowers her hand.   
She squints at Stiles, tilts her head and purses her full, glossy lips. She regards Stiles like Stiles is a puzzle, so Stiles takes another step back. Stiles is not a puzzle. Stiles is fine. Fine.  
The ornate redhead blinks then, smiles and says: “I’m sorry, you must be Stiles, Magda’s grandson. I am Lydia Martin, I didn’t mean to startle you.”  
Stiles waves his hand hello. Remembers he can talk, but doesn’t want to. She doesn’t know that he can anyway. Although she might not know he can’t either.  
“Aren’t you supposed to be talking now?” Lydia Martin arches her brow.  
Stiles frowns, sticks his hands into his pockets, rolls the lint and crumbs he finds there into a chewy little ball with his sweaty fingers.  
“Doesn’t matter anyway,” Lydia says and Stiles agrees, turns to leave.  
“Magda is taking a phone call,” Lydia offers, although Stiles didn’t ask.  
Stiles shrugs and keeps walking, only Lydia walks with him, her high-heeled steps softened on Magda’s thick carpets.  
“Have a cup of tea with me,” Lydia says and touches Stiles elbow. 

Stiles isn’t sure which one of them flinches harder; he’s involuntarily jerked his arm away, pressing it against his chest, and Lydia Martin is standing in front of him, hair oddly swept, eyes large, shaking her fingers out like she’s been zapped.   
“Oh,” she says for the third time since Stiles met her: “yes, definitely have tea with me,” she demands, reaches out her hand, bracelets chiming like fine china, and purposefully closes her fingers around Stiles’ wrist, green eyes defiant.  
“Don’t touch me,” Stile says with his unused voice.  
“Okay,” Lydia says, but doesn’t remove her fingers, uses them to steer Stiles into the kitchen, instead. Pushes him into a chair.

She puts Magda’s copper kettle on and pulls out jars, unscrewing lids, taking delicate whiffs of what’s inside, searching, searching.  
“The purple one that smells like gym socks is over there,” Stiles says without knowing why.  
Lydia pulls out the next jar, seems to be happy with what she finds, because she sprinkles some of its contents into two mugs, pours water over. It’s not the purple one.  
“So," she says, pushing one of the steaming mugs closer to Stiles: “does Magda know?”  
Stiles raises his brows.  
“About that,” Lydia says, and makes a disturbingly encompassing gesture towards Stiles, finishes it with a sharp point at where Stiles is knuckling his sternum.  
Stiles freezes, wraps his fingers around the mug to stop the drumming. “It’s fine,” he says to himself. “I’m fine.”  
“I don’t mean that,” Lydia says, and Stiles must have said the last bit out loud.  
“I don’t mean the PTSD or the anxiety and the depression that was there before, obviously she knows about that, she’s not blind,” she scoffs.  
And Stiles opens his mouth to respond, plants his feet to leave, but Lydia barrels on: “I mean about the wolves.”  
And what.

She lets Stiles gape. Takes little sips of her tea, unperturbed. Gets up to find some honey, languidly drizzles some into her mug. She seems to have a lot of experience with letting people come to terms with the things she says.

“How do you know?” Stiles finally asks. It seems like the most pressing of his many questions.  
“I know many things,” Lydia sighs: “you could say it’s kind of a curse, your grandmother is helping me with that.”

“Ah, good, you’ve met,” Magda says, entering the kitchen in a thick scent-cloud of lavender, cigarettes and sage.  
“Lydia is my friend and a very special girl,” she says, laying a wrinkled hand on Lydia’s shoulder.  
Stiles supposes ‘special’ is one word for it. There’s also ‘creepy’. And ‘possibly insane.’ Lydia smirks at him as if he were saying these things out loud.  
“You’ll notice, my dear,” Magda continues, opening one of the cupboards, pulling out what looks like moonshine but with some suspicious looking twigs and berries on the bottom: “that I’m not quite what you have always thought.”  
She opens another cupboard, pulls out three tiny, crystal goblets.  
“Brought these from Poland, they were my mother’s, and before that her mothers,” she says when she notices Stiles looking.  
“Stilinski mothers and Stilinski daughters share a special bond, this is how our strength is passed on, it's matrilineal." Magda says, dulling the T, rolling the R and emphasizing the I in a distinctly Slavic way.  
"But I was not to have a daughter,” Magda adds, her blue eyes sad for a moment, and so much like Stiles’ dad’s.  
“But I had a wonderful son, who was to have both a son and a daughter. You and a little girl whose name would have been Mila, and she would have had to carry the Stilinski strength.”

Stiles is shaking now, both fists pressed against his chest, because he can feel it filling, he can feel scratching and scraping and wet tearing sounds from the hollow cavity, and he’s scared senseless of what his new chest will be.  
“But that was not to be,” Magda continues, eyes sadder still and all of Stiles’ muscles lock down, he braces himself, because Magda is about to talk about his mom, and Stiles. Can’t.  
“Stop,” he thinks. Looks around for his whiteboard. “Please stop.” Remembers he can talk, just opens his mouth to beg, when Magda takes a seat next to Lydia, says: “fill the glasses, Stiles.”  
Stiles opens the bottle, momentarily stunned, then anesthetized by the sharp scent of alcohol, the follow-up fragrance of something spicy. It soothes the thrashing in his chest.

“Ugh,” he says: “you know I’m underage, right?”  
Magda purses her lips: “you are 18 soon, are you not?”  
Stiles nods.  
“18 is a man in the civilized world.”  
Stiles shurgs. It’s not like he’s led a particularly sober lifestyle.  
“Besides,” Magda adds, crosses her writs, wriggles her fingers in search of a cigarette: “if you are old enough to be hurt by wolves, you are old enough to have some of Magda’s special Żubrówka.”

It takes a moment.  
Stiles has filled all of the goblets with rust colored liquid when his mind catches up.  
“Apparently she does,” Lydia answers her own floating question and raises her glass.  
“Na zdrowie!” Magda says: “There are no empty spaces in life. This is why you are here, Stiles, you too will bear the Stilinski strength.”

So this is how Stiles finds out that his grandmother, Magda Stilinska, and by genetic association apparently him now, are of a long line of Polish witches, using what Magda calls the Stilinski strengths to aid, thwart and punish their allies and enemies ever since the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. “That was 1569 - 1795,” Lydia helpfully clarifies. When Magda was 17, she was bitten by an Alpha seeking to turn her into his mate by force. Her Stilinski strength kept her from turning, but after almost succumbing to the bite, she reemerged unable to have a daughter, whom she could pass on the strength to. This is why Magda is fine. She is fine like Stiles is. Some things leave a mark.   
But when Magda read in the local paper of a 6 year old Lydia Martin surviving an animal attack, she reached out. Lydia is not a witch, she’s from a long line of Martins from Cape Cod, mostly doctors and lawyers, but she had something in her blood. It spared her the full effects of the bite, but dialed up her sense of death, pain and destruction in people.

“Cheers,” Stiles rasps, downs his shot of what might as well be poison.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> magic is hard ...
> 
> ... also uh oh, who's there?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a quick primer on polish magic, should you be so inclined:
> 
> Ladanki are medicine and charm bags that have to be worn on the belt or around the neck. They contain written spells, herbs, stones, amulets and talismans.  
> Lechebnik is a book of spells every witch should have.   
> Matka Ziema is Mother Earth, but she's distinctly wet, also called Moist Mother Earth or Mother of Plants. She who raises flowers.   
> Red undoes spells  
> Slipknots protect from bad charms.
> 
> this is all just basic desk research and Google fu, I'm not actually an expert in Polish witchcraft (alas).
> 
> as always, thank you for reading.   
> xo

“So, how are you, son?” the sheriff asks in a voice turned tinny by the crap speakers on Stiles’ laptop; the worried crease that never seems to leave his forehead plain to see through the Skype window.   
“Fine,” Stiles says.   
“You always say that.”  
“Because that is always the answer.”  
Stiles rubs a hand through his hair, it’s much longer now, and constantly a knotted mess from baring the brunt of his anxious fingers. Fingers that, it seems, are useless at what they’re supposed to have centuries worth of skill in. Stiles sighs: “don’t worry about me dad, I’m doing OK, Magda and Lydia are looking after me.”  
His dad nods, resigned but not convinced, blue eyes searching Stiles’ face for clues.   
“And I’m glad for that, Stiles, but they are not … you are still going to therapy, right?” he asks, careful.  
Stiles nods. Because he is. It’s mostly horseshit, but he goes. Sometimes his therapist asks interesting questions. Occasionally she points out reasonable patterns. Not that Stiles can do much with that, but he supposes it’s prudent to be aware of the ticks and tremors in one’s brain.  
“Son, will you ever,” the sheriff asks and cuts himself off before committing to the question. Before asking, again, whether Stiles will ever tell him what happened.   
“You look better,” he says instead: “a bit too much like a criminal for my taste, but better.”  
Stiles smiles, looks at his own image in the tiny corner screen - his dark eyes and narrow face, the two finger ring – an identical twin to Lydia’s – on the hand propping up his chin, the edges of the one of his new tattoos; the broad shoulders, filled out with Lydia’s ruthless “learn to fight, Stiles” routines.   
“It’s not exactly street gang insignia, dad,” he says, absently scratching at the tail of the red S winding around his bicep. Slipknot after slipknot of magic-infused ink that turns his initial into a ward against ill intent and bad charm. His dad laughs, and for a moment it fills Stiles’ damp, dangerous chest with a flicker of warmth.  
“How’s school,” sheriff asks then, and Stiles’ shoulders droop.  
“It’s … I’m trying,” he says, because there is only so much he can lie during one conversation, and he has more important uses for “fine.”  
“You know you could … you can take some time off, defer for a year,” his dad starts, but they’ve had this conversation, and Stiles is not giving this to Gerard. Or the wolves, because according to Magda it’s still the wolves, who are to blame. Always the wolves. And while Stiles is not exactly a fan either, he does realize that Magda’s take on the wolves if perhaps slightly skewed. Magda has a sore spot the size of Texas. But never mind that. He’s not flunking out of college. The classes he’s taking aren’t even that difficult.   
The muddy mulch that crumbled from his hollowed chest the night he met Lydia, the night Magda opened his eyes, sloshes dangerously; bubbling higher; making Stiles wonder when it will overflow. So no, he is not deferring or flunking out; he will figure out a way to do college on scholarship even with the lethargy and the insomnia; the lack of focus, the impossibility of going to class on some days. He can do it.  
“It’s fine,” he says despite himself, rubs his thumb over the smooth underbelly of his ring, grimaces a smile.   
His dad twists his own mouth into an equally forced smile, his fingers fly across the screen in an attempt to stroke his son’s cheek.   
“Thanks dad,” Stiles says.   
“Love you kid,” his dad offers.   
“Love you too,” Stiles accepts, before clicking out of the conversation.   
He watches it minimize over an email; disappearing from where it was separating him from words like “second extension,” “final deadline,” “smart, but,” “committed enough?”  
He rubs his chest and tabs to the empty file of his mid-term, cursor blinking, accusing Stiles of being late, and scattered and useless. He groans, pushes away from the desk and walks downstairs. 

“Stiles,” Magda says from the kitchen: “do you want some tea?”   
There’s a cigarette dying a slow death in an ashtray, and Magda is chopping brunet saxifrage into astoundingly fine pieces – root in one pile, leaves in the other, a jar with seeds close by. She’s wearing a scarf with bright poppy blossoms to keep her hair, and her jewelry is a large pile of magpie delight on the counter.   
Stiles has no idea how saxifrage becomes so pungent when Magda cooks it into her “death defying” potions. It’s very mild, almost cucumbery, when Stiles rubs a fresh leaf between his fingers. It doesn’t actually defy death as much as postpone it for something like 20 minutes; but there are many people out there willing to pay for a 20 minute extension.

Stiles pulls up a large sack of plants, starts tearing off the leaves, snapping the florets, cutting the roots. The bare stems are the only thing getting tossed.   
“Not really,” he responds regarding the tea. Because he doesn’t lie to Magda, and ‘tea’ is code for her patient, but relentless prodding of what she calls Stiles’ ‘Stilinski Strength’, which Stiles, frankly, is starting to think is not a thing. Which he is OK with. Stiles does not need a thing. He is fine hiding behind Magda’s and Lydia’s. He is fine.   
But Magda is convinced, and if Stiles thought his dad was a stubborn man, he now knows that that is merely a diluted version of Magda’s willfulness.   
As a result of this willfulness Stiles has grown decent at picking, growing, identifying, drying, storing and even mixing herbs. He’s started his own lechebnik of charms, but so far they remain lifeless scribbles, lacking the gust of will to breathe the spells into life. And he’s surprisingly good at assembling the ladanki bags Magda makes and sells to her customers. But that’s it. Stiles is essentially a glorified PA, gardening included.   
“I know you don’t think you can,” Magda says: “but tell me, who is wiser, you or I?”  
She’s using a herb mincer on the saxifrage now; a firm grip of her knobby-fingers on both of the handles, running it across the plant matter at the speed Stiles thinks should defy physics.  
“You are,” Stiles begrudges.   
“That is true, I am,” Magda agrees, reaches out for her cigarette: “and I know that you can, you just have to find your zawlanie.”  
What Magda calls zawlanie is essentially a word of power, something that should focus Stiles’ energies enough to spark his strength. It can be anything, a word or a sound, but Stiles has tried everything that has ever had a modicum of a meaning to him. His mother’s name, her maiden name, his dad’s name, his passwords, the name of the monster he believed to live under his bed when he was 5, the name he would have given the puppy he was supposed to get on his 10th birthday. He has tried everything. So either he can’t invoke them, or he’s choosing the wrong ones, but either way he continues to be a sparkless Stiles, filled with his own brand of Stilinski strengthlessness, instead of magic.   
So Stiles says for a hundredths time - whiny, pathetic, and bored of himself: “maybe I can’t be sparked, maybe this,” he rubs a hand over his chest: “is too soggy to be sparked.”  
“Nonsense,” Magda says, pinching ingredients into an espresso maker, because she is nothing if not efficient, and espresso maker is quicker for potions than a cauldron: “Matka Ziema is a soggy place, sogginess raises flowers.”  
Stiles stands there, frustrated and exhausted, with nothing left to say, so he says: “I will try again.”   
“Good, now go to Lydia, fighting her always makes you happy.”  
And Stiles wouldn’t exactly call it ‘happy’, but Lydia’s ‘best defense is an offence’ approach to martial arts does ironically make Stiles feel less bruised, less bloody, and less like his chest of muddy waters is about to crack and overflow. 

“Good, you’re getting really good,” Lydia says. She brushes a loose strand of hair back from her sweaty face, starts unwrapping her hands. Stiles shrugs. He doesn’t feel good, he’s vibrating with the wrong kind of energy, keyed up and unsatisfied, because what Lydia calls good just means he’s dodged nearly all of her kicks, hits and punches, and has nothing to show for today but a baby-bruise high on his cheekbone.   
“Yeah,” he says, bounces in place, strains up on his toes then rolls back on his heels. Cracks his knuckles.   
“Stop that, you know I hate that sound,” Lydia snaps.   
And in a brief flash of inspiration Stiles cracks them again, then pops each of his fingers, smirking at Lydia. Thumb … index … middle …   
“Stiles!”  
fourth … little … other thumb … 

And Lydia jumps, wraps her iron thighs around him, and throws them with the impetus; pulls Stiles arm back and up, putting pressure on his shoulder. Another blimp of movement and there’s a knee in his back, compressing his lungs, making it hard to breathe. Stiles smiles into the gym mat.  
“You little shit,” Lydia says after a moment, probably getting a sharper read off Stiles with all of the skin on skin. She rolls and nudges him with her bare toes until he makes eye contact.  
Stiles waves his hand in an attempt to dismiss the heightened attention.   
“Stiles,” Lydia says, a little sad now, a little worried. And no, that’s a hard no from Stiles, he already talked to his dad today so his quota of compassion is all filled up, thanks.  
“Hey so,” Stiles sits up, unwraps his own hands: “I thought we’d redo my back today.”  
“We just did it four weeks ago,” Lydia says, eyes narrowed: “it needs to heal before we put more in, magic ink takes longer.”  
Magic ink does take longer; it also hurts like a curse. Which is kind of the point. Which Lydia knows.  
“Stiles, you can’t do this, this is not a good habit to cultivate,” Lydia stands, stretches, walks to the kitchen for a bottle of water.   
“You sound like my therapist,” Stiles grumps when she comes back, catches a bottle she tosses at him.  
Lydia shrugs.  
“Why?” Stiles demands: “why is it such a big deal, it’s just a little pain, the world is full of pain, why is it not OK to welcome some on my own terms, why is it only OK when it’s meted out when I least expect it?”  
Lydia doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t really do rhetorical questions. There are too many explicit ones she gets asked by creatures both living and not.  
“I’m taking a shower,” she says instead: “do you want to stay?”  
Stiles shakes his head. He’s gonna go get drunk.

So he gets smoothed over in a hole-in-the-wall Magda claims to be owned by a witch. Wraps himself in the caress of sweet-clover infused bourbon. It gels the sloshing in his chest to something that undulates in an almost sensual way, more honey than black waters. He’s just emerged into the dark street, turning onto his shortcut home, blinking against the darkness, when an eerily familiar voice says: “long time no see, kid.”


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> it's Laura.  
> Also kaboom.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for trigger purposes: fighting, Stiles hits a girl.

Laura Hale.

Laura fucking Hale is sitting on top of a dumpster; dark and thin like an alley cat, her wild hair in a jagged bob instead of the usual messy bun. She’s wearing a black leather jacket, black and white stripe leggings, and a pair of patent leather Dr. Martens. She’s a punk song reject.

Stiles expects to freeze.  
He expects to crumble; or turn and run.  
He expects the sludge in his soul to turn into acid and burn through him. Instead the clover in that witches booze has warmed him, slowed him into a steadiness of sorts. So Stiles doesn’t run. He uncurls; straightens his back, rolls his shoulders out. Remembers he knows how to fight now, and even if he hasn’t found his word yet, his blood comes in grade-a ‘Stilinski strength’. The ink on his bicep pulses at the thought.

“Look at you,” Laura says, jumping down from the dumpster: “grown up all mean and pretty.”  
Stiles stretches his mouth into a razorblade grin.  
“So this is what you do now, huh? Get drunk in witch bars? Classy.”  
Stiles leans against the building behind his back, buffs his serpent ring on the thigh of his jeans.  
“I would have thought,” Laura says, takes a step closer: “that someone so repelled by the supernatural that he runs away from home, would be less inclined to play with magic.” Laura’s voice is cold, eyes colder, teeth sharp: “or is it just wolves you hate, but witches are fine, because what? They’re human?”

  

And the unfairness of it almost knocks Stiles out. It flaps into him, broad and unyielding like mountain wind, and he’s glad there’s brick behind his back, otherwise he’d be swaying on his feet. Because it was Derek, who gave him an ultimatum. Either Stiles takes the bite, or he’s out. And when he didn’t take it, he was discarded like garbage. None of the wolves came to his aid, when he was tortured in their name. He wasn’t good enough to be in their pack, he wasn’t even good enough to be their friend, all because he’s human. And Laura Hale is standing here, face twisted in righteous anger, accusing him of being speciest?  
“Learned to keep your mouth shut too, I see,” Laura adds, stepping deeper into his space. Her predator is basking in his distress, . 

And that, the absolute cruelty of it, finally unfixes Stiles. He breathes in, curls his hand into a fist, and punches her in the face. The serpent ring catches on her chin.  
“Had a lot of practice,” he says, watching Laura’s head snap to the side, a cut slicing through her skin, then slowly knitting itself back together: “courtesy of Gerard Argent. Thanks for that, by the way. Nothing like being electrocuted for friends, who don’t care if you live or die.”  
Laura shakes her head, thumbs across her healed chin, blinks at Stiles.  
“Argent?” she says. Her voice wavers a bit from it’s frozen pedestal. And Stiles is done having this conversation. Memory lane’s been nice and all, but he’s ready to go home now.  
“Get off me,” he says, pushes Laura in the chest, because she’s still there, in his space, effectively caging him against the wall.  
“Don’t push me, kid, answer the question.”  
“Fuck you.”  
Laura’s eyes flash beta gold.  
But something is growing in Stiles, springing forth from the shadowed quagmire that is his chest; warming in his limbs.  
“Fuck. You. Hale,” he repeats, voice even.  
“Answer me,” Laura is losing control fast, snarling through a mouthful of fangs.  
“Bite me, mutt,” Stiles grinds out, giddy with the growing force in his chest, the tingling in his fingers.  
But that may have been a wrong choice of words here, because Laura does. She bites him - wolf teeth sudden and deep in his wrist. Stiles stares - incredulous - at the ring of bleeding marks marring his skin; at the blood smearing her lips, almost black in the darkness of the night.  
“Don’t worry kid,” Laura face is back to human, but it twists into disdain so visceral Stiles recoils: “it’s not gonna turn you, just a beta bite.”

The barely formed scabs are torn from Stiles’ hurts. From where his shitty little heart broke when Derek didn't want him without the bite. Anger flashes blue. It vibrates through his chest like a bomb in a lake, shakes up everything, hums under his feet. He uses one of Lydia’s dirty tricks, kicks Laura in the knee, trips her. Twists using their combined weight, and shoves her against the wall; bloody wrist pressing down on her throat.  
“Wouldn’t work anyway,” he spits.  
“Oh this,” Laura sneers; voice labored with the pressure Stiles is putting on her larynx. She makes a show of licking her teeth, smacking her lips on an exaggerated taste of Stiles’ blood: “has to be real magic to be of any use, pup.”

There’s a beat of perfect calm before it happens. 

A tectonic shift in Stiles.  
A crack and a flash.  
A dizzying scent of ozone, followed by thick smoke and a crumbling brick wall.  
Stiles blacks out.

 

When he comes to, he’s lying in a strange bed, his ears are ringing, and most of his body hurts in that pervasive, tissue-deep way. There’s a large wolf on the bed, licking the teeth marks on Stiles’ wrist; then moving on to what hurts like a burn in Stiles’ palm. It has a dusky-gray, almost violet coat, the kind of those ‘Russian blue’ cats, but its eyes are Hale. A pale amalgam of green, gray, gold and aquamarine.  
“Huh,” Stiles says and passes out again.

The second time he wakes up he’s still on that bed - a hotel bed if the blandness of the room is any indication - and the blue wolf is also still there, sleeping on its side near Stiles’ feet. Stiles stretches and yawns, feels for hurts worth noticing in his body. He feels mostly fine, the ringing in his ears has subsided, and the overall pain is gone, he can feel the bite and he can feel … yep, one of his palms is burned. Interesting. But other than that he seems to be fine. 

He makes his way to the bathroom for a drink and a piss; finds a towel covered in black grime, and what looks appallingly like blood, flesh and melted skin. Gags. Because that is not from his palm. His burn is nothing compared to what soiled the white cotton. Laura must have been hurt too. 

Stiles thinks on it for a moment, staring at himself in the mirror. Realizes it was him, who must must have hurt Laura. Yet Laura still dragged his passed out ass back here. So Stiles stares at his blistered palm until he notices thin lines webbing up his wrist, disappearing into his sleeve. So he strips out of his shirt, pulls off the tee - and right there, curved around the ball of his shoulder - is a Lichtenberg mark; spreading out like a feather; like frost on a window; like a Fire Flower that Magda always talks about. Did he … as pretentious as it sounds, it seems that Stiles may have struck Laura with lightning. In which case it's a miracle she’s still alive. That Stiles is still alive. 

So Stiles fishes his phone out of his pocket and sends a message to both Magda and Lydia: “am fine, will explain later,” and pads back to the bed across beige carpet. Tries to examine the wolf from a safe distance. 

What is a safe distance to an angry, hurt werewolf? Probably more than the couple of feet separating them right now. But no matter what Stiles thinks of the Hale pack, he could have killed Laura, and he definitely doesn’t want that. So he sits on the bed and reaches a tentative hand towards the smokey fur. A pointy ear twitches, and Stiles pulls his hand back. Lightning or not, he passed out, then passed out again, and he sure as hell doesn’t actually know how to do any of it on command; so if Laura wants to eat him, it is extremely likely she will. Laura’s wolf makes a soft chuffing noise and turns, regards Stiles over her paws. 

“So,” Stiles says: “you can turn into a wolf.”  
The wolf stares, makes no indication it understands human speech.  
“De ..,” Stiles starts, then changes course: “I was under the impression that it wasn’t a thing.”  
The wolf huffs, haughty and proud.  
“It’s kind of impressive,” Stiles mumbles.  
They sit in silence for a while, Stiles turning over his burnt hand, the wolf resting her head on her paws, eyes half open but firm on Stiles. 

“I’m sorry I hurt you,” Stile finally says.  
The wolf flicks its ear, seems unimpressed.  
“Do you want me to call someone? Or I could call Magda, she can bring something that would probably help you heal,” Stiles offers.  
The change from a calm, lulled atmosphere to brink of extinction is dizzyingly fast. One moment the wolf is lying down, looking like it’s about to take a nap, the next both of its ears are pulled back, muzzle wrinkling as it lifts its lip, baring fangs first, then teeth, growling.  
“Ok,” Stiles says. Because that is an obvious no. 

He lies back on the bed, stretches his hand towards the wolf but doesn’t touch, just keeps it there. Stares at the ceiling. 

What a fucked up mess this is. 

He feels a warm wet tongue on his hurt palm then, soft licks that somehow soothe the pain.  
“Why didn’t you come for me?” he asks the ceiling, not even turning towards the wordless beast on the bed.  
“When Gerard grabbed me and tortured me, why didn’t you look for me?”  
The wolf whines, a long, pathetic, splintered noise.  
“Yeah, yeah,” Stiles says and passes out again.


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> um ... magic made me do it?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay so ... i've planned this since the very beginning, and now it's time, and i hope you won't eat me.  
> *hides under the bed and refuses to come out*

Stiles wakes up hot and sticky, tongue thick in his mouth, blood thrumming with magic, skin too tight.  
There’s a softness of flesh against his side and a heavy weight of someone’s sleeping head on his arm. He turns into it blindly, presses up into the relief of naked skin, rubs his face in a thicket of silky hair, and his hand down a warm, smooth flank.  
“Yes,” his blood sings. “This.” “More.”  
Stiles’ fingers follow the dips and slopes of flesh, enjoy the feel of bone and muscle under skin. His skin grows tighter still, and he shifts his hips, rubs his wood into the delicious give of pliant flesh. Feels it ache in his teeth.

Absently wonders about his healed palm.

Rubs it over the naked person in his bed again to make sure.  
Yup. All better.  
His mouth tastes like chalk and chlorine and batteries; all of his tattoos are simmering, flexing, stretching; waiting to pounce. There, in his chest, the once empty, then festering cavern is filled by something frighteningly large, unmistakably warm, and alive. Turning, turning, sniffing; looking for a way out. Huffing the flame of Stiles’ magic, making his blood boil.

He should really call Magda. This can’t be normal, right? Stiles must have fried some circuits yesterday, zapping Laura.

And holy shit-fuck, the naked person in his bed is Laura Hale.

The insides of his head freeze, but his blood doesn’t relent, doesn’t allow Stiles to peel his hand back from skin. “No,” it sings. “This.” “More.”

A loud yawn and the spring of flexing muscles under his hand make Stiles finally crack his eyes. Laura is waking up, turning away from where she was snuffling into his shoulder, rolling onto her back - naked, naked, totally, absolutely naked - because wolves don’t wear clothes, and she must have shifted back at some point in her sleep.

Stiles tries to control his eyes, but the magic doesn’t let him. It drags his gaze crisscross from the dark shadow of her lashes -- _look_ _Stiles_ \-- to the sharp angle of her cheekbones, the curve of her lip – _pink_ , _so_ _pink_ \-- the jut of her chin, the fragile protrusion of the clavicle -- _you_ _could_ _break_ _it_ _Stiles_ , _you_ _could_ _break_ _her_ , _you’re_ _bigger_ _than_ _her_ _Stiles_ , _do_ _you_ _see_ , _how_ _you’re_ _bigger_ _than_ _her_ \-- the dark point of a nipple -- _bite_ , _Stiles_ , _you_ _want_ _to_ _bite_ \-- the plump swell of her breast, down over the flat expanse of her belly – _tear_ _Stiles_ , _shred_ \-- towards the crease of her thigh -- _look_ _Stiles_ , _are_ _you_ _looking_ , _are_ _you_ _looking_ , _Stiles_.

Stiles shakes his head, tries to clear it. Rationalize away the scorch of his blood, the throb in his dick; tries to remind himself that he’s probably about to lose it, because there is no way Laura won’t feel a boner riding her hip and there is no way she will look kindly on it.

“You done, kid?” Laura says then, and Stiles startles; would fall out of the bed if his magic didn’t keep him glued to her.  
“Sorry,” Stiles says.  
“Yeah?” Laura smirks; half-rolls her hip into his hard-on then flings into action. She pushes Stiles flat with both hands, and climbs over him, straddles his hips in a few elegant moves. Doesn’t put any weight on him though. Hovers, the warmth of her body just inches above Stiles’ dick. She stares at his face. Stiles wonders what she sees. He feels flushed, his eyes unfocussed. The scratching in his chest is getting more and more demanding.

“You want this, pup?” she asks, rolling her pelvis, flicking her eyes down the length of her own body.  
And Stiles does, he wants it like breathing, but he’s dimly aware that his magic is screaming at him to take, pound, mount, own, tear apart, and that maybe he would be making different choices if the magic would keep just a little quieter.  
“I think,” he pants: “my magic is doing something,” he licks at the sweat on his upper lip: “screwy.”  
Both of Laura’s hands are on his shoulders and she’s looking down at him, a simple smile on her lips, face framed by a curtain of black hair, completely unruffled by her own nudity or Stiles’ grabby hands and insistent dick.  
“I don’t mind,” Laura says, shrugging one of her shoulders, and Stiles is mesmerized by the following jiggle of her breast: “magic’s usually difficult to dissuade anyway.”

  
Stiles’ hands rub up from Laura’s knees, over the strong flex of her thighs, her long fingers circling more than half way around them, up-up, past the hinge of her hips, digging in his fingers, grabbing handfuls of flesh, fingernails leaving marks, he’s sure. His dick twitches.  
“I … it feels like I want to hurt you,” Stiles whispers.  
And Laura throws her head back, her laughter filling the room. Ringing high under the ceiling.  
“You can certainly try,” she says through its remnants, leans down until Stiles feels the cool peaks of her breasts on his bare chest. She kisses his magic filled mouth with soft, wet lips and sharp teeth.  
Stiles bucks up into it.

“Yes,” his blood snarls. “This.” “More.”

“Eager pup,” Laura murmurs, more to the growing thing in his breast than his conscious brain. She bites down on his lower lip, pulls on it. Rolls her ass further into his grasping hands, then reaches back and unclasps one of them. “Let’s move this,” she says, with a wet mouth and dirty eyes: “here,” she cups Stiles broad palm over herself, presses the heel of it down on her pubic bone. Stiles’ fingers are dipping into the hot, wet folds of her cunt, the hair tickling his freshly healed palm. Laura shifts, fucks her hips forward; gets Stiles’ fingers deeper. Stiles circles and crooks. The sighs falling from Laura’s lips a cool breath of air on his crackling skin.  
“There,” Laura gasps, as Stiles finds a better angle. She grabs his wrist. Hard. Bruising. Yanks his hand closer, forces his fingers deeper.  
Stiles slips a third in, spreads them, then jabs his fingertips down on what he thinks is her sweet spot. He can hear Laura grinding her teeth, and she’s not letting his hand go, so Stiles keeps doing what he’s doing, until he sees a slice of gold from under her lashes. Her moans seep into his blood.

“Yes,” it purrs. “More.” “Break.”

He doesn’t wait for Laura to come down from her orgasm, doesn’t even pull his fingers away from her cunt, just flips them with the conviction of the magic in his chest. Laura’s head bounces off the mattress hard. She laughs again, stretching out her neck, blood visibly hammering in the pulse point.

“Tear,” his magic twists: “Taste,” “Take.”

But Laura rakes her nails down Stiles’ chest, 10 blazing bright marks focusing the skittering sparks in his system, pulling him in, turning him out.  
“Let’s see then,” she smiles, bony fingers on his fly. She twists the fabric, pops the button, and Stiles is whiting out at the edges, torn between Laura’s careless, boneless, satisfied smirk, and the deafening thrumming in his own blood. He can hear the toothy rasp of his zipper, and feel Laura’s hands on him. Her grab possessive through thin cotton. She teases a thumb under the crown of his dick, coaxes a blurt of precome to soak through his underwear. Stiles shoves a hand down his pants then, fists his dick. Laura laughs again, uses her freed up hands to nudge the denim and the cotton down Stiles’ narrow hips.  
“Oh, look at you, pup,” she says, delighted: “look at you, all long and lean, and with a big boy dick.”  
Stiles is just holding on to it at this point, entirely succumbed to whatever the fucked up magic jolts are doing to his blood, whatever the fuck Laura Hale’s raspy voice is doing to his brain.  
Laura’s hand closes around his shaft, pulls once, twice; a twist of her wrist, a firm clutch of her fist. And perversely, absurdly, insanely, Stiles thinks of another grip just like that; a hand that twists at the wrist like that. His blood howls, careens him over. He bites Laura on the shoulder, fights to take his own weight, snakes a hand around her neck and squeezes. His other one is scratching down perfect olive skin; raising welts on a delicate breast.  
Laura wraps her legs around him, squeezing the breath out of his lungs. She claws his back and pulls his hair. And just as the animal in Stiles’ chest is lining himself up …

“Take,” “Claim,” “Own.”

… is about to core Laura with a harsh, thoughtless stroke, she snorts, she honest to god snorts. Her eyes glow gold, and she says: “oh no you don’t,” flicks on her wolf strength, easy like lights, and flips Stiles. She’s holding his wrists in one of her fragile, dainty looking hands, fingers grinding on bone like shackles.

  
“Aw, pup,” she coos: “your magic wants to top, huh?”  
Stiles is breathing hard, his nostrils scorched with what feels like fire.  
“No.” Laura saya: “Laura’s rules.”  
Stiles bucks up, either to throw her off or to fuck into her, he doesn’t know any more, and Laura laughs, laughs, laughs until the room is full of it, popping like champagne bubbles, like soap, like popcorn.  
“Shh, now,” Laura says, separates Stiles wrists, but keeps her iron hold. Presses them firmly down into the mattress on either side of his hips.  
She rocks back, shoves the hot, slick slit of her cunt against the underside of Stiles’ dick, lying high and tight on his belly. Smears her juice up and down the shaft. Rolls her pelvis, snubs her clit against the ridge of the crown. Stiles is making broken noises now, half words and breathy gasps dribbling down his chin. His orgasm is nearing the brink for what feels like a hundredths time, as Laura carelessly crests another one of her own.  
“You can come now,” she says: “but that’s all you’re gonna get.” She’s flexing her hips in languid little circles, her come dripping down towards Stiles’ balls. The magic in Stiles whines at the lack of blood, but Stiles does. He comes from his toes. An explosion of magic and old hurts.


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the inevitable talk before we reintroduce the grumpier Hale.  
> tired!Stiles  
> jury still very much out whether forgiving!Stiles

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> uh oh ... so ... backing away slowly from the het and the ostensible dub con and all of those other things that you didn't like in what I thought was a reasonably delicious sex scene (remember the moral compass that doesn't point north that I mentioned in the very first set of notes ... yeah, that ;)
> 
> love you  
> thanks for reading, commenting and kudosing ... kudoing?

“Feel better?” Laura asks, when Stiles emerges from the shower. She’s sitting on the floor at the foot of the bed, lacing up her boots over a pair of skinny jeans. Her hair is wet from her own shower. Plastered against her skull like a shiny black helmet.  
“Yeah,” Stiles says, pulls on both sides of the damp towel hanging around his neck, feels awkward.  
“Listen, I don’t really … this is kind of fucked up,” he offers: “it sounds ridiculous, but I swear my magic made me do it.”  
“Way to make a girl feel special,” Laura says, tone flat.  
Shit.  
“No, I mean … shit,” Stiles flusters.  
Laura laughs.  
“Relax, kid, I’m fucking with you. It’s no big deal … sex is … not really a big deal for me … for us. So unless you’re all upset about it we’re fine.”  
Stiles briefly considers asking about the us. Is it “us wolves”, or some other “us”, but decides against it.  
“Besides,” Laura says, rubs her knees together, stretches her arms out: “I told you, it’s not that easy to argue with magic, I could feel yours, it needed a pressure valve.”  
A pressure valve.  
“That’s so fucking romantic,” Stiles says, clutches his chest.  
Laura smiles, a little sad maybe, but mostly her typical too-many-teeth grin: “it is what it is, kid.”  
“Ugh, could you, maybe, not call me kid now?”  
She tilts her head in mockery of contemplation, then shakes it: “sorry, no.”

Stiles pulls the towel from his neck, rubs it across his hair one more time, lets it drop on the floor. Laura’s sitting cross-legged now, tracking all of his movements, relaxed enough, but eyes alert. She reminds him so much of her blue wolf. He kind of wishes he could see it again.  
“So, full wolf, huh?” Stiles says, and sits down next to her.  
“Passed down the maternal line,” Laura says.  
“Cool,” Stiles mumbles. A girl thing. Of course it would be a girl thing.  
“And magic?” Laura asks.  
“Also matrilineal,” Stiles offers: “but apparently works on boys if a lot of shit happens to the family, and no girls are born. I suppose that’s the one interesting thing that’s come from getting all banged up.”  
Laura snorts.  
“Hey, maybe Derek could try that,” Stiles snarks, immediately regrets it, his mouth souring. This is the first time he’s spoken the name in months.  
“Trust me kid,” Laura says, face somber, eyes drawn: “if getting banged up would evolve Derek, he’d be a three headed dragon by now.” She fingers a small hole on the knee of his jeans, makes a visible effort of unglooming the conversation and adds: “I’d be a unicorn.”

Stiles scratches the side of his face. Wishes he hadn’t said anything. Because what is he to do with this? He … the place where compassion is condensed - Stiles doesn’t know if his even works any more. He realizes he knows so little about the Hales, about Laura, about Derek, and yet he twisted himself around them, like Morning Glory, like insidious Bindweed; enough for it to bleed endlessly, when he was torn off. 

Laura’s skinny, cold fingers walk across his Lichtenberg mark. “Does it hurt?” she asks.  
Stiles shrugs, looks at his shoulder. It doesn’t, really, and he doesn’t mind it either. What’s another mark. At least this one is visible.  
It does remind him though: “I’m sorry I hurt you. I didn’t mean to, well I meant to, but I didn’t mean for it to be quite this … intense. Also sucks it was fire,” his gaze drops.  
He hasn’t talked about the fire with any of the Hales, but he knows about it. Everyone from Beacon Hills knows about it.  
Laura bumps her shoulder into his in wordless acceptance. 

“Listen,” she says then, twines her arm with his, braids their fingers together, effectively anchoring Stiles to herself. Stiles’ tenses. The talk is upon them, and he’d really rather not. He presses his free hand to his chest, but it feels alien there. It’s all still and silent - no sloshing, no scratching. Not even that hollow echo desperate to be beaten like a drum. Just a chest. Very odd.

“We didn’t know. I didn’t know. Derek didn’t know about Gerard. I swear. If we knew, we would have never left you there, you know that, right?” she speaks a little faster than normal, her voice pitched higher. It carries through the room.  
Stiles doesn’t say anything. Because it sounds reasonable. Now. It sounds reasonable right now. But the fact of the matter is that Stiles didn’t know back then. Still doesn’t really know for sure. He has Laura’s word, but it’s … just not enough. 

They left him. 

He never expected them to leave him. And then, when he realized the did .. hope dies last, it takes a while, but it dies. 

“I’m really, really sorry this happened to you, Stiles,” Laura whispers.  
And Stiles gets a angry at that. Not a lot, nothing violent. Just annoyed, because, what the fuck is that even? What is he supposed to do with this?  
“I don’t know what to do with this,” he says.  
“How so?” Laura asks. She’s turned her entire body towards him now, they’re sitting at a 90-degree angle. Laura’s front to Stiles’ side. She’s still holding on to his hand.  
“I mean, ok, you didn’t know Gerard had me, but didn’t you wonder? It had been more than a week since you guys last saw me, I skipped a meeting, none of you wondered? I skipped school, did Scott not see that?”  
And Laura fidgets at that, her fingers spasm, where they’re intertwined with Stiles’.  
“That … our Alpha kind of made it very clear that you weren’t coming back,” she hedges: “and we were to give you space. It also quickly turned out a bad idea to mention you,” she rubs a hand over her neck, soothing a phantom sensation of some sort. “I’m not sure about Scott, if he noticed, or if he brought it up to anyone, he didn’t to me.”

And that … tears Stiles apart a little, along the quartering lines from before. Both Derek and Scott.  
“Derek told you to not mention me?” he asks, a little broken a lot pathetic, mostly pissed at both.  
“He was upset, Stiles,” Laura says in a hushed tone.  
“He was upset?” Stiles snaps: “he basically told me I was a worthless piece of shit without the bite, and he was upset?”

Laura blinks at him. 

Four or five separate, slow blinks, which combine into a time-warped reel of her feelings. First there’s confusion. Then suspicion. Then something like eye-rolling resignation, then anger. That last one is the strongest, and it has Stiles trying to disentangle himself from her clutches. 

“He did what,” Laura says, face a perfect mask of calm, only both her top and bottom canines are sharper than strictly necessary.  
Stiles yanks his hand back and crosses both over his chest, scoots away from her. He doesn’t need another set of bite marks, and he doesn’t want to set the room on fire.

“I wanted to have sex, he was super shifty about fucking a human. Said I should get the bite, because otherwise I’m not pack, and it was pretty obvious that he felt I wasn’t good enough for him.”  
Laura sighs, rubs both of her fingers into her temples, then down and over her face. Mutters something unintelligible that has “stupid” and “assholes” in it.  
“He told me he asked you if you’ve considered the bite, because he’d like you to be safer,” she says, slow, careful, expecting a reaction of some sort from Stiles. Which - fair enough - he did zap her with a lightning bolt not so long ago.  
“He did not,” Stiles says, dumbly.  
“He did,” Laura says, patient and even keeled like a preschool teacher: “so for him, what happened was that you threw his offer back in his face, told him to go fuck himself and ran off. Which he interpreted as your deep aversion for becoming a wolf, thus all wolves, and in particular him.”  
“I did no such thing!” Stiles protests: “I mean … I might have told him to fuck himself, but come on … I spent months hanging out with you, helping you, helping Scott, is that something someone, who hates wolves would do?”  
“You’d be surprised,” Laura says under her breath, voice and eyes dark. 

Stiles sighs. All of the fight, and the energy, everything holding him upright seems to seep out of him. He scoots down to sprawl against the edge of the bed, stretches his legs out. Then gives up any semblance of sitting and shifts further to lie flat on the floor. They stay like this for what feels like hours. Laura’s back propped against the bed, Stiles spread out on the carpet, eyes to the ceiling. Both of their phones meep for attention now and again.

“You know, I’m gonna tell them, right? That I found you?” Laura finally says, stretching her legs, folding her torso down over them to ease out the kinks in her back.  
“How did you?” Stiles asks the ceiling fan.  
“Find you?”  
“Uh hum.”  
“I stalked your dad, listened to his phone calls; broke into his home office, you know.”  
Stiles nods. He does know.  
“But why?”  
Laura shrugs: “weird feeling, and Derek started having dreams.”  
“About me.”  
Laura nods. 

This is so fucked up. 

“Are you going to tell him about this?” Stiles encircles the two of them with his index finger.  
“Yeah,” Laura says, brows relaxed, forehead creaseless like the summer sky. Like it’s the most obvious thing to do. Like she hadn’t given it a single thought.  
“Isn’t that weird?” Stiles asks. Because it’s definitely kind of weird. Maybe. It doesn’t feel actively weird, but he thinks it should. This is not what normal people do. 

A scruffy, aviator clad: “not a normal human being,” floats up from his subconscious. And neither is Stiles, anymore. 

“Is there anything about this that isn’t weird?” Laura counters. And Stiles can’t argue with that. 

“I’m gonna have to tell Magda and Lydia,” he realizes.  
“They’re your pack now?” There’s such wistfulness in her voice at saying this, that for a brief moment Stiles suspects his compassion generator has shuddered back to life.  
“No, they’re … we’re not … it’s more like,” Stiles waves his hand, and concedes: “yeah, kind of yeah.”

“Are you ever going to forgive us?” Laura asks, crawling closer to Stiles looking at his upturned face.  
“Fuck if I know,” Stiles says, feels extremely tired all of a sudden.  
“Fair,” Laura sighs, pecks him on the lips.  
“See you later, kid.”  
“Can I stay here for a couple of minutes, I’m kind of trashed, I’ll call Lydia, see if she wants to come pick me up.”  
Laura nods.  
“I called myself from your phone while you were in the shower, so I have your number, pick up when I call.”  
Stiles flips her the bird.  
She hoists her tightly stuffed black backpack over her shoulder, and walks out of the door. 

 

It takes Lydia 20 minutes to come get him, and Stiles doesn’t move once during that entire time. His bones are soft with fatigue and he’s fine on the floor. Why would he get up? The floor is fine.  
He does get his knees under him, when Lydia texts that she’s up fron. It feels like he’s 90 years old. Or has half a lung.  
“Definitely fucked up,” he thinks, walking to the elevators on stilted legs, close to the wall the whole way, in case he needs it.  
Lydia actually gets out of the car, when she sees him. Which must mean that Stiles looks like shit. Because Lydia is wearing 8-inch heels and she does not take kindly upon exiting her vehicle in these.  
“What happened to you?” she demands.  
“Long,” Stiles tries, decides to forgo all unnecessary words: “saw Laura, spark happened, lightning bolt, then sex.”  
“What,” Lydia says, even though she probably got all of that and all of what it implies.  
She puts a hand on Stiles elbow to help him in the car and Stiles feels it jerk, staying put just through the strength of Lydia’s will. Which means she got something off him.  
He just needs a nap.  
Really, very much.  
More than anything.  
Just a nap please.

“I’m assuming the lightning bolt is a metaphor?” Lydia asks.  
Stiles shakes his head. Lydia swears in French and peels away from the curb.


	16. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lydia swears in French  
> Magda swears in Polish  
> Stiles does not a break get

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> dudes ... what even ... 16 chapters ... and *counts on fingers* at least 4 more coming, at least. what have you done to me?
> 
> more on monday
> 
> <3

“I love you, Stiles, I really do, but you’re dumber than a box of rocks sometimes,” Lydia says, speeding through the groomed streets of Riverside.  
Stiles doesn’t argue. First of all he doesn’t really disagree, and secondly he just doesn’t have the energy. He rests his head and takes little sips of the diabetic coma latte Lydia brought for him.  
“Why?” Lydia continues, unruffled by his lack of response. “Why would you talk to any of the Hales? They suck, remember, we hate them.”  
“I don’t hate them,” Stiles mumbles.  
“What was that? I’m sure I misheard you, but I swear to got it’s almost like you said you don’t hate the pack of goddamn selfish beasts that left you to be tortured by Gerard Argent.”  
Lydia cuts corners and nearly runs a red light.  
“They didn’t know,” Stiles says.  
“They didn’t know,” Lydia repeats, and it’s not at all like she’s having an “a-ha!” moment or a thawing perhaps. It’s more like she’s tallying up all of the damning evidence in her head.  
Stiles spills whipped cream and caramel syrup down the front of his shirt as the mini jumps a speed bump.  
“And why on earth would you stick your dick in Laura Hale?” she continues.  
And technically, Stiles didn’t. But he’s not sure Lydia would appreciate the nuance. He yawns. The sugar and the caffeine are good, but he’s just, really, really, exceptionally tired.  
“Oh, I’m sorry, am I boring you?” Lydia demands.  
“Sorry, Lyds, I’m just tired.”  
Lydia flashes a look at him, a slice of worry, before she turns back to the road. Her tirade continues, a bit softer in tone than before, but not by much.  
“Does she know you are in love with her brother?”  
“I am not in love with her brother,” Stiles assures on another yawn.  
Lydia bares her teeth.  
“I might have been a bit attached, but she doesn’t know that, and it doesn’t matter anyway.”  
Lydia jabs a manicured finger at the console, shuts up her radio.  
“Well what about him? She said he was upset at you leaving, wouldn’t he be … I don’t know … upset that she found you first and banged you?”  
The way she says “upset” makes it sounds violent, and bloody.  
Stiles pulls at his hair, then at his earlobes to keep himself awake.  
“I don’t know, ok, I am not a werewolf whisperer,” he says, irritable and close to tears: “she made it sound like it wasn’t a big deal.”  
Lydia stops the cross examination then, drives the rest of the way in seething silence, and Stiles, too tired to feel uncomfortable, gratefully zonks out. He wakes – not entirely, maybe into 60% alertness – when they pull over in front of Magda’s house.

“Can you get into the house?” Lydia asks, and the rage in her voice has morphed into something spindly and vulnerable. If Stiles had better access to his mental capacities, he’d call it hysterical. But then again, if Stiles had better access to his mental capacities he’d remember that Lydia hates that word, with all of its historical and autobiographical connotations, so he’d probably settle on “raw” or “emotional.”  
“Aw,” he slurs, half asleep, and oddly feeling drugged by his magic again. Even his tattoos seem to be waking up, twinkling in his body like Christmas lights.  
“dun cry Lyds,” he tries.  
“ _Quel_ _bordel_ _du_ _merde_!” Lydia swears, slams her car door and comes around the other side to help maneuver Stiles into the house.  
“Dunswear,” Stiles suggest, because he’s helpful like that, also warm, so warm, hands limp and stringy like soup noodles, wow, he’s tripping balls here: “Magda dunlikit.”

Magda’s standing on the front step, holding the door open, and they stumble past the threshold. The entire house groans as they enter.  
“Diduguss hear dat?” Stiles asks. Lydia and Magda exchange a look.  
“Isss bad,” Stiles guesses.  
But he doesn’t feel bad, he feels warm and snuggly, his joints loose. A bright bubble of air bumbling around inside his skull; lighting it up. He wishes someone would hug him. Or maybe find him a teddy bear. Oh hey, a wolf. A soft cuddlywolf. Yes. Stiles giggles.

“Stiles, mój drogi, what happened?” Magda asks after they’ve maneuvered him into bed. Her claw-like fingers are on his forehead, and the smell of cigarettes and belladonna, mixed with the clink of jewelry, clears Stiles’ brain for a moment.  
“Found my spark,” he says: “but almoss killed Laura wid lightning. Magic is screwy.”  
“He had sex with Laura Hale!” Lydia accuses from the other side of his bed. Her hands are on her hips, pointy elbows out, like an angry bird. “Maybe she slipped him something!”  
Magda tsks, but waves a hand at Lydia to get her to calm down.  
“Thass not why,” Stiles tries to explain: “magic was fucked first, that’s why Laura.”  
“It still doesn’t mean you had to have sex with the wrong Hale.” There’s an odd stomp, which Stiles thinks may have been Lydia’s foot. He giggles again.  
Lydia - queen Lydia, usually so composed - kind of sounds like she’s frothing at the mouth. Stiles want’s to make her feel better, remind her that all Hales are the wrong kind, but is over-taken by a rolling wave of careless lethargy and exaltation.

“Lydia, calm please,” Magda says: “wolves love differently.” She wrinkles her nose while saying that last part, as if she’s personally affronted by it, but says it nonetheless. And Stiles wants to ask what that means, but he really can’t, because his mouth is so swollen and soft. He touches his lips. A wonderful plush bounce of warmth and spit and tongue.  
“Stiles, can you remember what your word is, your zawlanie? What unleashed this?” she points at Stiles. And Stiles kind of wants to say: “well lady, point at yourself, because I’m pretty sure this screwy magic is all you,” but he says “cuddls,” instead.  
Magda and Lydia look perplexed and somewhat uncomfortable.  
“N,” Stiles tries to explain: “wnt cuddls.”  
Lydia sighs through her nose, and primly sits on the side of his bed. Rubs a small hand down his back. It’s nice, but let’s be frank here. Lydia Martin sucks at cuddling. Epic levels of suckage.  
“Stiles,” Magda says, voice more urgent now, worry evident on her painted face: “your word, can you remember what word you used?”  
Stiles thinks. Well he tries to, but it’s like jello-walking.  
“Think maybe “mutt”,” he offers, giggles again. Get’s a sharp jab of a sobering thought, and adds; voice mousy: “maybe Hale.”  
Magda hisses a set of inseparable consonants, which Stiles is fairly certain is a swear in Polish. Then resolutely declares: “I will make you some tea,” and rushes out of the room, throwing an insistent: “Lydia!” over her shoulder.

Lydia finds two extra pillows, because she’s a goddess, that’s why - and in a stroke of genius, or perhaps just her own brand of creepy psychicness - one of Magda’s fur coats for Stiles to cuddle with. It’s not wolf, or bear … Stiles thinks it might be bunny, and it smells all wrong. But he buries his face in the fluff and stops fighting the siren song of sleep.

He doesn’t really wake up as much as is yanked a few layers closer to consciousness, when Magda and Lydia bustle back into the room, a beaker of eye-wateringly pungent tincture with them, as well as a nice, harmless cup of chamomile. The light is weird, Stiles would have thought it would be dark, he it should be evening now, but it’s all pale and bright.

“Stiles,” Magda says. Stiles can see the clumps of concealer trying to hide the dark circles around her eyes: “you need to drink this, something is out of balance with your zawlanie, and how your spark is reacting to it, we need to tamper it down until I can figure out what is going on.”  
And if that isn’t the most ominous statement ever.  
“Mrrw,” Stiles says, tries to push himself up on elbows to accept his fate by beverage, but doesn’t get too far.  
“Stiles, just drink this, it’s the third time we’ve tried to wake you, you’ve been out for something like 30 hours.” Lydia’s voice still has that screamy, bird-like timbre to it. She props his head up. Magda counts the drops of stinky elixir into the tea.  
It doesn’t taste like much, and doesn’t really make him feel all that different either. But he does feel like he can hold his own mug after a couple of sips.

Magda and Lydia seem to be having a barely audible, mostly like bat-signal based argument about something. There are some harsh hand gestures. He’s pretty sure he catches: “call the Hales,” at some point and “magic needs them,” at another. So he takes a too-large gulp of his tea and says “no,” a couple of frantic times, until Lydia decides he’s having a panic attack and sort of sits on him.  
Because squeezing the peripheral nervous system helps with panic. Stiles knows this, because Lydia showed him a documentary about cows once. Except Stiles is not having a panic attack, and is not a cow; he is having reasonable - albeit strong - objections to calling any of the Hales.

But Magda extricates his phone from the crumpled flop of jeans on the floor - courtesy of Lydia - he really needs to buy her one of those good fruit baskets, the kind that doesn’t use honeydew for everything, and jabs to dial. Stiles listens to the trilling of Facetime. Wow Magda, such a technobabe. Stiles giggles.  
“Yes?” he hears Laura picking up.  
“Hello,” Magda says, tone polite but entirely unfriendly: “you are Laura Hale?”  
“Yes,” Laura says, her voice hesitant: “who … are you Magda?”  
Magda nods, haughty, but pleased to be recognizes.  
“Jussgivit,” Stiles says.  
“You must return to Riverside,” Magda says like she’s not an aging Polish witch in California, but Queen Katherine the Great, at the very least.  
“Must I, now?” Laura says, and Stiles can’t see her, because his phone is unfairly kept from him, but he can hear the teeth perfectly.  
“Givvit,” Stiles despairs.  
He sees Lydia and Magda exchange a glance, and they come over to the head of his bed, Lydia holds the phone, sits on one side of him, Magda hovers on the other side. This way Laura can see Stiles, and they can see Laura.  
“Stiles?” Laura says, clearly surprised. It takes a moment for Stiles’ eyes to focus enough, but then it's his turn to startle. There are three deep, red gouges down Laura’s cheek and neck, two of them continue in gnarly gashes over her shoulder.  
“Wuppnd t’you?” Stiles asks, eyes as wide as his trippy brain-syrup allows.  
Laura flicks her wrist in that old, dismissive gesture.  
“Wysss no healin’?” Stiles demands.  
“It’s healing just fine, just taking a bit longer,” Laura says, resigned. She seems to be somewhere in the woods, maybe in the preserve. Her hair is tucked into a baseball cap and she’s wearing a sweaty tank top.  
“Why?” it’s Lydia asking the question this time.  
“They’re from an alpha.” Laura’s eyes are defiant, refusing to look down or away.  
“From an alpha,” Lydia repeats, totally vindicated. She’s such a petty creature, queen Lydia. She flicks an evil, gleeful grin at both Stiles and Magda.  
“Yeah,” Laura says, rubbing at one of the barely scabbing gashes: “a jealous alpha.” She sounds thoughtful at that, like she’s calculating for a mistake: “he’s usually better at sharing, but I guess he’s also better at hiding things from me than I gave him credit for,” she mumbles, more to herself that for them. And Stiles can feel Lydia tense on his side again, expanding into a huffy cloud of outrage.  
“Laura,” Magda interjects: “something is happening with Stiles’ spark, I think you must come to Riverside. If possible bring some of your family books?”  
She’s still nowhere near friendly, but continually polite; the wrinkled coral of her lips frowning at the edges.”  
She disconnects.  
Stiles passes out wondering who the fuck else is coming.


	17. Chapter 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stiles just can't catch a break.  
> But, hey, look, isn't that Derek Hale?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> POV changes are hard, I hope this isn't too head-hoppy.  
> Also magic is like ... a massive pain in the ass to cultivate. Apparently.  
> The writer seems to be a sadist. Poor Stiles. 
> 
> Thank's for sticking with me on this, love your <3-s and thoughts, as always.

_There are trees, trees everywhere, taller than Stiles has ever seen._

_Russet trunks reaching into the skies like columns of an invisible temple._

_The green needle banks far enough from the eye to be leeched of color. They seem black against the pale skies._

_The earth underneath Stiles’ sneakers is dry and rustling. There’s a breeze caressing his face and the forest smells lovely. Of pine and redwood, of sand and fresh water._ _He can feel the magic in his chest again. It is heavy, and warm, but seems calm enough right now not to claw at Stiles. It is urging him on, though._

_They are searching for something._

_Stiles is unsure of what it is, but it’s important to find it._

_He’ll know it, when he sees it, his magic whispers._

_He just needs to find it. Find the thing. He’s sure of that. More sure than he’s ever been of anything else. As long as he keeps moving and searching, the press in his chest seems content._

_The trees around him change as he walks; they grow sparser until there are no more conifers, no more soothing, sappy fragrance, just an oak-dotted terrain of lower foothills. The sun beats down harsher there, the air arid and oddly thin._

_This is not exactly real. Well it is real, like all magic is real, but this is not exactly the same plane of existence, where he has spent his 18 years. Stiles knows that. He thinks he must be sleeping, or maybe submerged into his subconscious. There are fragments of sentences, slivers of fragrance penetrating whatever vale he’s behind. A wisp of Magda’s cigarette. A slice of Lydia’s voice. These reach him like clinking of the pipes, when you’re holding your breath in a bathtub. There, but inconsequential. High up, higher than the trees even._

 

Lydia is running her frantic hands all over Stiles. Fingers in his messy hair, his cheekbones, the pointy tip of his nose. He’s too warm under her hands. She can’t get a good read on him. It’s as if he is somewhere deep under ground. Not in the earth but on another plane entirely.

“I can’t get a read on him,” she whispers.

Magda clicks her tongue, pushes Lydia aside to draw a rune in Stiles’ palm.

“Calm yourself,” she says: “try again.”

So Lydia calms herself, and tries again. Hones her mind into spider-web thin wisps, send them far and wide. She’s still not getting much, can’t grab Stiles, can’t ask him to come back, but she does get a sensation off him now.

“It feels like he’s looking for something,” she says.

“Kwiat paproci,” Magda gasps: “fire flower - but he’s not ready, it’s too soon for him to be on the quest for the flower. We have to bring him back, the journey is treacherous for practiced witches even.”

 

_“Fire Flower,” Stiles hears. It’s Magda’s worry that pierces through the vale. A pinprick. So he tries to remember Magda’s stories. Fire flowers grow on ferns. Their delicate stems, almost invisible to the human eye, twist around the other plant’s stalk. The bloom itself is tiny, but so bright it will light up the darkest night, which is why it’s so hard to find during the day. Stiles looks at the sun, tries to understand what time it is, but he can’t see it. He can feel the heat on his skin, but nowhere in the sky can he see the ball of fire lighting up this realm._

_He knows how hard the flowers are to find. In Magda’s stories great mages and witches have perished on their quests. The flower amplifies its owner’s powers, but this comes at no small cost. The path is made to thwart the seeker; filled with dangers both to flesh and mind._

_So Stiles tries, he really tries to wake up._

_To go back. Because he is in no way ready for this._

_He tries to reach for Magda or Lydia, to let them pull him back to that other plane. Because he is not ready for it, despite being tossed here and urged by his magic to go, seek, search, conquer._

_But no matter what he does, how hard he concentrates; he just be sinks deeper, his reality floats further out of his reach._

_Stiles, it seems, has no choice._ _Like he usually doesn’t have a choice. So he keeps walking._

 

“He’s getting further away,” Lydia says. She can feel a scream building in her belly, an acerbic thing of fear and loss.

“Yes,” Magda says, her face grim, lipstick almost gone, carried off by endless cigarette filters, not having been reapplied since Lydia and Stiles got back to the house.

“We have guests,” she suddenly proclaims: “please go see them in.”  
And Lydia doesn’t want to leave Stiles, doesn't want to go open the door for the stupid Hales, but she can’t reach him anyway, and at this point all the skin on skin contact is just driving her mad. So she stands, smoothes her hands over her clothes, tucks a stray strand of hair behind her ear, and walks downstairs.

There are two wolves at Magda’s door. The female one, strong and wiry, with pale slash-scars on her face – Laura. And a big, angular, male one. He is snarling, eyes flashing red. Must be Derek. Lydia wants to gouge her nails into his face.

“Break the ash,” Derek Hale demands through a mouth full of fangs.

“Not ash,” Lydia says: “half of the house is rowan, to keep mutts like you away.”

Laura’s eyes flash gold, but she reels it in, pulls on her brother’s elbow.

“We can’t help, if you don’t let us in,” she says, looks Lydia in the eye. Her gaze is steady and strong. Lydia doesn’t want to respect it.

“You can’t help anyway, you are useless and break everything you touch,” Lydia says, looking straight into the red eyes of the Alpha.

 

It’s fascinating, almost, to see the wolf and the man fight for dominance. The ridges appear on his nose; hairs sprout. He’s about to roar in Magda’s suburban neighborhood, about to try and tear Lydia’s throat out, barrier or no barrier. And good riddance. She can slam the door in their faces then, go back to Stiles.

 

But the man wins - against all odds - under Lydia’s skeptical gaze, Derek Hale resurfaces, fights the snarling beast back, drops his eyes. It’s as close to a “please” they will ever get. Lydia knows this. Laura knows this. Derek Hale knows this.

Lydia sighs, spit wets her thumb and presses it over the runes in the door jamb.

The wolves crowd past her before the protection has gone all the way down even. There’s an acrid smell of singed flesh. They’re up the stairs before Lydia can turn around.

 

 _The world flickers. A shaking of the realm, like an etch-a-sketch, and Stiles can hear roaring and commotion from back where he left Magda and Lydia. He can feel pinpricks of claws on his upper arms, he can feel a hot breath on his face._ _But his magic doesn’t want Stiles to linger. It shushes and rustles, fills Stiles’ ears with soft noise. Makes it difficult to focus on what they are saying._

_The terrain under his feet changes too; grows springy with moisture, smells like wetness and decaying leaves. Stiles notices a small stream and the magic in his chest chooses that as their path. There are slender-branched willows, some black cottonwood, even mountain laurel skirting the stream. Stiles feels like he should recognize this place; should know these trees, but he doesn’t._

_The stream grows wider._

_The bushes thicker._

_There are no pathways for him to follow, so he has to go through; carve out openings between the trees and the branches. Clamber over fallen branches, slimy with moss. They forest keeps getting spikier, branches scratching his face and his hands. It doesn’t want Stiles to go that way. But Stiles remembers Magda’s stories. This must only mean he’s getting closer._

_“Death that way,” a blubbery voice says: “marshes, wet and deep, will suck a boy like you up.”_

_Stiles looks around, but he can’t see anyone. The voice seems to come from everywhere._

_“Show yourself,” he commands. Puts his magic behind it._

_The wet voice laughs._

_“Can’t command me, little Spark, this is my realm.”_

_“What do you want?” Stiles asks._

_The squelching echoes all around him, bounds off branches, glug-glugs in the ground._

_“I am cold,” the voice says: “the little spark in your chest is warm. Let me in, and I’ll help you find your flower.”_

_It seems like a trap._

_Stiles knows it seems like a trap, but he also knows he will never find the flower on his own._

_And he wouldn’t try even, but he can’t find his way back either. He remembers another part of Magda’s story. A Fire Flower found by a witch can help them protect those they love from evil._

_“It’s true, you know,” the wet voice promises: “it will help you keep everyone safe. Lydia, Magda, you dad, the Hale pack.”_

_“Will you really help me find it?” Stiles asks, because creatures lie and trick._

_“I will,” the voice splatters like summer rain now._

_Stiles thinks. If this is a fey or a spirit, he needs to make sure he’s asked all the right questions, worded in a way not to leave loopholes. If this is a demon … well. It doesn’t really matter either way of this is a demon._

_“Do you wish me harm?” Stiles asks._

_“No,” the wet voice says. Soothing like a calm wave of an ocean._

_“Okay,” Stiles thinks, and on his next gulp of air chokes. Feels like he’s been dunked under, water filling his ears, his nose, his lungs. “It lied,” he manages to think, but the pressure eases, and Stiles no longer feels like he’s drowning._

_He knows the creature is in his chest though. Curled around the warmth of his magic, like a wet blanket._

 

 

Lydia feels it, when it happens.

She doesn’t even have hands on Stiles, the goddamn wolves are on him, sniffling, touching, low whines escaping their throats. Stupid beasts.

Magda is standing by the window, leafing through a thick, leather bound tome Laura Hale handed her.

And then, in a brief moment suspended in time, Lydia feels it happen. A wet slap, a cold clasp of something constricting around her lungs. The wolves feel it too; she sees their spines go rigid and muscles tense.

“What is this,” Lydia whispers.

“He smells wrong, why does he smell like this?” Derek demands, digging his nose into Stiles’ armpit.

“What is the smell?” Magda asks, voice quivering.  
“Wet, wet,” Derek huffs, frantic and desperate. Less alpha, more a mindless pup.

“Smells like a marsh,” Laura whispers, hands on her brother, anchoring him, or maybe herself.

The book falls with a heavy thud from Magda’s hands.

“It’s a blud.”


	18. Chapter 18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> things get really, very bad.  
> also, first row seats to Derek Hale's heart breaking in slow motion.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> melodramamama, i am.  
> but hurts so good. 
> 
>  
> 
> also I am slowly falling in love with Lydia POV. Multi-pov FTW. Because how much fun is describing Derek Hale through multiple sets of eyes, huh? *coughs* *chokes on own spit* nevermind ugh *blush*

“What is a blud?” Laura asks, and Lydia wishes she didn’t. Because the other wolf, her brother, has his face pressed against Stiles’ neck; mouth full of fang open on delicate skin, and he looks half crazed as is.

Magda sees it too. Lydia sees her see it, but she tells them anyway.  
“Blud is a forest fairy, a wandering spirit. It seeks seekers and leads them around aimlessly, so it can feed on their magic.”

There’s a broken sound torn from what sounds like the depth of the brute’s lungs. Lydia watches his sister’s spindly spider-fingers walk across his back and shoulders, press shakily into his neck.

“Why?” Derek asks, not lifting his face, smearing the word into Stiles’ clavicle.

“Blud’s are cold, they have no sparks of their own,” Magda says, and Lydia hates her a little for how clinical she sounds.

“But they can’t lie, right?” Lydia suddenly realizes. Demands loud enough for everyone’s head to snap towards her. Well, almost everyone’s. The giant lump of a wolf just shifts; crowds closer to Stiles, wraps his paws around his body.

“No, most fae can’t, they trick though, find loopholes,” Magda says, the wrinkles on her face deep and desperate.

“But Stiles knows this, you’ve told him this?” Lydia insists.

Magda tilts her head in agreement.

“So maybe,” Laura whispers. And Lydia wishes she didn’t.

 

_“Let’s rest, little Spark,” the thing in his chest says._

_“No,” Stiles stubbornly refuses._

_Because he must be getting close now._

_He must._

_The forest is really playing tricks on him; changing colors, shapes and directions. Undulating with magic, conjuring up things both dark and sad from the musty corners of Stiles’ mind. He tries to prepare himself for when it will inevitably show him ... He tries to prepare for the worst. But how does one prepare for the worst?_

_And he is so tired._

_Much more tired than he was._

_His legs slow and clumsy; the creature in his chest like water in lung; sieving every breath into hard labor._

_“Aren’t you tired,” the creature asks, not unkindly._

_“I am,” Stiles says._

_“Let’s rest then,” its voice is like soft gray foam on a teal wave, chipping away at Stiles resolve._

_“Are you sure you are leading me in the right direction, that you are not just another trick of this forest to push me away?” Stiles asks, gasping for breath, slowly sinking to his knees._

_Seems they are taking a break anyway._

_“I am sure,” the creature says, its voice an almost tender glub glub._

_“But I am so tired, we must be walking in circles,” Stiles sighs._

_“Rest then,” the creature insists._

_So Stiles rests. He curls into a ball on his side - a shell around the oddly cooling hearth of his magic; around the wet being in his chest. He rests his head in the crook of his own arm, eyes glazed over, but turned towards the skies. The light never changes, Stiles still hasn’t seen the sun, but wisps of pale cloud move across the blue in a hazy time-lapse of Stiles’ stupor._

_He doesn’t know how long he lies there, and he doesn’t feel any more energized, when he slowly pushes himself up. First on his knees, then digging his toes into the soft moss beneath, coming up to his feet. His magic too, seems weaker, but what pulse it has, it reminds Stiles to go. The creature and it seem at odds._

_“Rest some more,” the creature suggests._

_“Let’s go,” his magic wills him to walk, flickering in uneven flares, like faulty wires._

_“Bad,” Stiles thinks. “Water and faulty wires are bad.”_

_But the soppy creature in his chest seems to be enjoying the extra heat his twitching magic provides._

_“Alright then,” it agrees: “that way towards your flower.”_

“He’s too warm,” Derek Hale mutters into the layers of fabric on Stiles’ side.

Lydia watches, with a detached sort of curiosity, how he barely reels in a snarl, when Magda walks over to place her arthritic fingers on Stiles’ forehead. How Laura uselessly tugs on Derek, when Magda says: “he’s running a fever, it’s his _zawlanie_ , fighting. We need to cool him down, get his shirt off.”

She watches Laura give up on tugging at Derek’s clothes and pull his hair. Watches them snap their teeth at each other, but sober enough to tear off Stiles’ flannel and t-shirt.

Watches Stiles’ body flop, soft and spineless, in their arms.

“Be careful,” she snaps just as Magda says: “Lydia, ice?”

“Isn’t the blud sapping him of his spark?” Lydia asks, her voice oddly dry to her own ears.

“Isn’t it a bad idea to cool him down further?”

“Yes and no,” Magda sighs: “the blud is draining his spark, but slowly enough, and if we don’t cool him down his zawlanie’s efforts on that plane will fry his brain on this one.”

So Lydia turns to go get ice. The last thing she sees before leaving the room, is the lump of a Hale burying his head somewhere near Stiles’ hip; grabbing one of Stiles’ hands and pushing it into his own hair in a pathetic mockery of Stiles cradling his skull.

_There’s a pine tree in their path now. It would dwarf the ones Stiles saw scratching the skies, when he first dipped up in this realm. It stretches up so far that Stiles can’t see if it ever ends, and the trunk is as wide as a wall._

_“I will never be able to walk around it,” Stiles thinks, desperately._

_And the creature blubbers in sympathy, leaning heavily on the flicker of magic in Stiles chest._

_But Stiles makes his feet take steps. One. Two. Ten._

_Oddly, when he reaches the tree and rests his hand against the gloomy, dark bark, it feels soft under his fingers. Living and breathing almost. Huffing air into Stiles, keeping him upright._

_“Good little Spark,” the creature sprinkles with joy: “if you insist on going to the flower, we hold on to this, nice and warm here, yes.”_

_They walk for what feels like days; endless dragging steps and rasping breaths, helped by the warmth the tree seems to emanate, but not by much._

_“Rest now, little Spark, we must that way for the flower,” the voice in his chest dibbles, pointing him away from the tree._

_And Stiles looks at his tree with bleary eyes, sees it to not be that wide after all. A trick. Another trick. Unless he only takes each tenth step he thinks he takes._

_“Did you make it seem so insurmountable?” Stiles asks._

_“Not I,” the being drips, almost offended._

_“Are you still taking me towards the flower?”_

_“I,” the creature promises: “but rest first, rest against the tree, the road is long yet.”_

_So Stiles rests. He sits in the damp moss, back against the bark, feeling cold seep into his bones from the dark, deep earth, from the wet burden in his chest._

“Magda!”

Lydia is screaming.

Because Magda has closed herself into the study, going through endless books, and calling her contacts for solutions; and she is stuck here, watching Stiles fade in a hopeless grip of a desperate wolf. Two desperate wolves.

“Magda!” she is shrieking, she’s aware of it, but the S of Stiles’ tattoo has turned from red to blue.

Magda bursts into the room, hair fallen loose of its pins, hands bare of most of her jewelery.

“Make room,” she yells, rushing over to the bed. And Laura moves; steps aside, but Derek doesn’t. Of course he doesn’t.

“Don’t,” Lydia almost says, when Magda reaches to push Derek away. Because that can’t be a good idea. Derek’s claws are out, buried in the mattress. But she doesn’t get a chance to warn Magda, because she has already pushed, and Derek turns, face in full shift, eyes crimson and roars.

 

There’s only a second of a sound, it seems. After that its stretching and silent; just the growing pressure in Lydia’s skull indicating that the roar is still going. Fibrillating through every surface, every object; every ounce of meat, bone, skin and blood in the house. If not for the wards probably the entire block.

It knocks both Lydia and Magda against the wall, and sends Laura skittering in mindless, petrified submission; eyes gold, neck and belly bared.

 

The first thing she hears after the ringing in her ears subsides is Magda’s: “make room, or be banished from my house.”

Because Magda is fearless.

So Lydia has to watch, yet again, the wolf and the man fight under Derek Hale’s skin. And surely, an enraged alpha will come on top this time, but no. Eyes fade back to pale, claws get pressed into his own palms; blood dribbling in sickeningly thick streams, and Derek steps away from the bed, moves to reach out a slick hand to help his sister to her feet.

 

Lydia doesn’t want to respect that.

 

The moment he does though, the moment they’re not touching, Stiles’ breath grows labored. It’s loud enough for human ears - wheezy, raspy; unnervingly wet - crackling through his esophagus. His lips are slowly turning the same shade of blue as his tattoo. And it’s Laura this time, who figures it out first.

“He was feeding off Derek,” she says in a scratchy, shocky voice.

 

“His spark is fading too fast,” Magda says, dull and lifeless. She steps out of the way. Derek is tearing off his t-shirt and back on the bed, plastered against Stiles, before his heavy leathers hit the floor. His veins pop in dark, grimy lines.

 

“I am calling my son,” Magda says and leaves the room.

 

Lydia walks over to the bed, on the other side from the mourning wolf; places her own hands on Stiles, but nothing happens. She can’t give him anything. Laura too tries, but shakes her head. It seems only Derek can ease his burden. And Lydia wants to hate him for it.


	19. Chapter 19

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> scary trek through the bad forest continues. life is hard when you have a blud in your chest.
> 
> everyone arrives. it would be a party, but it's not. 
> 
> Lydia is not an optimist.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oy vey bun-buns, torturing Stiles is exhausting.  
> *falls on her face*
> 
> but i promise a resolve to the whole blud thing in the next chapter. 
> 
> also i think david bowie is haunting me. every time i listen to blackstar like once ... okay maybe 3 times, it sticks with me through the entire night. and it's really super mega disturbing to have someone ominously hum "in the villa of Ormen" in your sleep.  
> yet, salt and burn seems like a sacrilege. send help. accepted in candy and kisses and maybe like, your most favorite ever sterek recs.
> 
> today, frankly, sucks. 
> 
> i hope yours is better. 
> 
> <3 thanks for reading, your comms and kudos are life.

_Stiles has lost all track of time and space. He walks in tiny, stilted steps; choking for air; growing more and more indifferent to what the forest does around him. The mirages and terrors flex and shimmer, but Stiles might as well be blind. His memories of the other realm grow wispy too; holes eating away faces and names. Even the creature in his chest has stopped begging for breaks._

_And Stiles would._

_Break._

_Permanently, because he doesn’t care, he doesn’t even remember what he’s looking for; but the weak pulse of magic in his chest keeps dragging him on and on through a damp forest filled of cruelty._

_Some time later - hours maybe, or years - the woods grow gloomier, darker and danker. Stiles stops at a marsh, toes of his sneakers dipping. There is no way around it, and when Stiles puts his foot in the black waters there is no bottom. The only thing looking remotely steady are little clumps of Soft Rush spattered across the width of the water._

_“Across?” he asks his chest._

_“I,” it sighs._

_It must be tired too._

_So Stiles hops, if it can be called that - unsteady and unknowing of why - from clump to clump, deeper and deeper into the mire._

 

_“Don’t look down now, little Spark,” the voice in his chest whispers. They are far enough from where they started to not see the edge in any direction. And it’s so sudden, the voice, in the off-beat squelch of his shoes, that Stiles stops. And looks down._

_He never saw his mother’s face, when she was dead. He was there, when she was dying. He was there, the moment she died, but the nurses pried him off and pushed him out of the room, just after her heart finally stopped. And he never once looked towards the coffin at the funeral._

_This is what she must have looked like._

_She’s floating in the marsh, almost underneath Stiles’ feet, her skin waxy and gray, and she doesn’t look like Stiles’ mom. She looks like a stranger, who’s wearing her dead skin. There is no expression on her face. The muscles are lax; lips white. Thin skin clinging to the shape of her skull as if there was nothing in between of it at and the bone. Her dark eyes are open, but lifeless and fogged over._

_So Stiles gives up too._

_He takes a step back and falls into the icy waters._

The she-wolf jumps up from where she was sitting on the floor, lunges at the bed.

“They’re not breathing,” she roars, and Lydia feels her heart clench.

But Laura is pressing her ear against first Stiles’, then her brother’s chest, and in a lightening fast move, slashes her claws over Derek’s shoulder. Pulls her arm back and punches the claws into his thigh. Blood seeps into the fabric of his jeans; sluggish and slow.

“Come on,” Laura cries: “come on, come on, you’re an alpha, you can do this.”

Tears are streaming down her face and she punctures her brother’s other thigh: “come on, heal, come on.”

“CPR Stiles,” she yells at Lydia, but there’s a weak cough coming from Derek and his wounds are closing up before Lydia makes it to the bed.

“Okay,” Laura says, still crying: “okay.”

 

Lydia gets her a glass of water. That’s all she can do it seems. Get things while people are dying.

Ice.

Water.

“I can’t,” Laura starts, and Lydia thinks she will now say she can’t lose her brother. Can’t lose her brother too. Because Lydia knows about the Hales. But she’s wrong. She can. Just as Lydia can lose Stiles. Everyone can be lost.

 

But Laura wipes her face on the bottom of her t-shirt and gets off the bed. Puts her empty glass on the bedside table and starts undoing her boots. Then stripping off her t-shirts. First the loose black one, then a tighter gray one. Underneath it a white tank top. No bra.

“She dresses like a soldier,” Lydia thinks; vaguely, remotely.

 

“I can’t give Stiles energy, but I can take some of Derek’s pain, maybe feed his wolf some of my wolf’s magic,” Laura says, and gets back on the bed. Presses her naked flesh to her brother’s wide back, eyes challenging Lydia to say something.

But Lydia is out of things to say.

And Laura’s shoulders bunch as her skin is marred with black lines.

“Fuck,” she breathes through the pain, pushes her forehead against her brother’s nape.

 

_“Hold on, little Spark,” the voice in his chest implores._

_But Stiles is tired. He doesn’t want to grab on to the Rush. He wants to sink to the bottom of the marsh._

_He wants the voice silenced. He wants to stop walking._

_But his magic flickers again - unreliable and uneven - suddenly there. Why? Bursts of heat in his arms and legs, forcing them to flex, push, paddle and hold on. He tunes out the sploshy sounds the creature in his chest makes; lets his magic take over. Lets it heave him back onto the little patch of turf, collapses with his legs still dangling in the water._

 

It's oddly calm, Lydia decides. The tangled heap of bodies on the bed almost seem to be sleeping. Lydia can hear three sets of lungs, pulling in air, and she is thankful her lack of wolf hearing keeps her from knowing how unhealthy Stiles’ breaths must sound. As is, to her mostly-human ears, he sounds like a boy with a cold. Not well, but not dying.

Naïve.

Naïve.

Because he is dying.

She rubs her thumb across the serpent ring on Stiles fingers, then her index on the paling, alien blue of his tattoo.

Lydia is not a fighter like Laura.

And not an optimist.

All her fight was used up a long time ago. What she has now is mostly martial arts training and shadow puppets. She wishes she knew how to hope for Stiles.

 

There’s a commotion downstairs. A bang of the front door. Raised voices, a set of footfalls clomping up the stairs.

This door too, flies into the wall. Crack of plaster, and an aging man, with panicked watery eyes storms in. Must be Stiles’ dad.

“Stiles!” he calls: “Stiles!”

“He can’t hear you, we haven’t been able to reach him for days,” Lydia says with her paper dry voice.

 

There’s a rustle of fabric and a click, and the sheriff’s pulled a gun. He’s pointing it at the bed.

“What,” he yells, mindless with worry: “what, what?” he emphasizes each hark of a question with a wavering point of his gun.

“Why are there naked people hugging my son?”

He’s holding his gun with both hands now, a steady line from it’s tip to Derek Hale’s skull.

“Why are there naked crime suspects hugging my naked son?!”

 

Magda enters with labored breaths. She shouldn’t be running stairs; her joints can’t take it.

“Put your gun away, syn, it will not work in this house anyway,” she huffs.

“The hell it won’t,” sheriff yellls: “get off my son!” He aims a bullet into the floor.

There’s an impotent click of a trigger. Nothing else.

Magda’s house, Magda’s rules.

 

“What.” The sherrif says again, staring at his weapon, then back at his son. The clump of metal clutters as the man staggers over. Lydia moves out of his way, picks up the gun. Puts on the safety.

“What’s wrong with him?” the sheriff whispers, rubbing fingers on his son’s face.

“I have told you about magic time and time again, syn.” Magda says. She’s wearing a scarf with bright white calla lilies around her head and they make her look pale like the moon.

“I thought that was … a metaphor,” the sheriff says, sits on the edge of the bed.

“Why?” he starts, points at the Hales.

“They are helping,” Lydia finds herself saying. The sheriff blinks at her with uncomprehending eyes.

 

The bedroom door bangs again, more plaster on the floor, and no one even flinches this time. Scott skids to a stop, face blotchy, eyes scared.

“He jumped on my windshield,” the Sheriff says when his mother flicks a disapproving look from Scott to him.

“The rest of the … ,” Scott starts, swallows, peeks at an ashy looking Sheriff: “the others are coming too, they can’t handle their alph … they have to come, because of Derek,” he says. And Derek growls. A weak sound, but the first one since that cough of coming back to life.

Sheriff’s eyes widen a fraction. He looks helplessly at his mother.

 

“You should leave,” Lydia can’t help but say to Scott. Loser McCall. Traitor McCall. He hurt Stiles more than anyone.

“I’m his best …” Scott starts, but the words wither in his mouth under Lydia’s stare. She’d almost dare him to finish that sentence.

“I want to help,” Scott whispers. Turns towards the pile of bodies on the bed: “what are we doing?”

“Get over here,” Laura says; quiet, tired, struggling, and at least, Lydia observes, the stupid boy-wolf is well trained into his pack. He hooks a finger in the neck hole of his shirt, pulls it off, kneels on the floor by the bed. Leans against Laura’s back.

Fucking wolves.

 

“Lydia, my darling child, please offer my son some Zubrowka in the kitchen. And some information,” Magda says. “I still have calls to make.”

Lydia wants to press a fist into her mouth and wail. But she resigns herself to tucking stray hair behind her ears. She goes, she always goes when Magda asks.

 

They settle into a rhythm of sorts. An appalling, absurd thing that Lydia thinks is waiting for death, but the wolves seem to think is battle. Stupid beasts. It’s only a battle if it can be won.

More of them arrive.

A car piled with three young males and another she-wolf. Nervously pulling on her long blonde locks, eyes darting around the room, nostrils twitching as she the smells of magic and herbs of Magda’s house reach her. They can’t all fit on the bed, but they have at least a hand on each other. A weird wolf-chain of blackened veins and animal magic.

Magda barricades herself into her office. If it weren’t for the thick stench of cigarette smoke and the occasional trilling of the phone, Lydia would think she has left her house.

The sheriff mostly keeps to the kitchen with Magda’s special Zubrowka. He cries, and comes out to stare balefully at his son. He never moves further than the threshold though, because he now knows the mountain of bodies in the room comes with claws and fangs. Lydia told him. Lydia also told him they are helping. But she knows he doesn’t believe it. He drinks himself into a light stupor trying to.

Lydia sits in a straight-back chair by the window and watches Stiles’ face.


	20. Chapter 20

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> uh ... a giant fiery explosion?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you have no idea, how hard i had to fight the shithead part of me, when it kept whispering: "make this the last chapter."
> 
> like so *makes big hands* hard.
> 
> but right now I foresee 2-3 more chapters in this. 
> 
> aslo apparently, since i've hurt the juice out of Stiles its Derek's turn now. owies.
> 
> thanks for traveling with me, buddies <3

_Stiles opens his eyes to billowing green._

_His clothes and shoes are soaking wet, but he’s no longer in the middle of the marsh of ghosts and memories. Instead, he can see what seems like thousands of bright green ferns, a glowing chartreuse carpet underneath the dark canopy of trees._

_“Search here, Little Spark,” the damp weight in his chest says._

_So Stiles gets up and searches, walking in spirals through the field of ferns, running his fingertips across their silky tops._

_“Are you sure its even here?” he asks his chest._

_“Your Flower, not mine,” the voice drips; presses tightly into the warmth at Stiles’ core. It seems a bit steadier now, his spark; not exactly strong - each step still costs, as does each breath - but it doesn’t feel two flickers from going out._

_Stiles combs the vast verdant, wears out both his soul and his fingers by willing each plant to be his Flower’s keeper._

_“What happens, when I find it?” he has a sudden thought._

_“You try harvesting it,” the creature murmurs._

_“And if I succeed?”_

_There’s a suspicious silence in his chest. The wet clench around his spark intensifies._

_“Speak, I command you; what happens, if I succeed harvesting the flower?” Stiles demands._

_There’s no answer._

Lydia can see Stiles’ eyes flutter behind his lids.

“Something’s going on,” Derek Hale says the same instant: “I can feel something happening.”

“Something good?” Laura asks, and Lydia truly doesn’t know where she gets her fight. How can she still have any?

Derek doesn’t say anything.

“Something bad,” Lydia deduces.

“I can’t tell,” Derek sighs; a tired breath seeping into Stiles’ matted hair.

 

But they are spared from dwelling on it, when Magda arrives. A serpent slide of her slippered feet; bright green scarf covering her hair; rings and bracelets back in place, clinking like wind chimes.

“I know of a way,” she says.

She doesn’t raise her voice, but the entire house turns to her. Walls lean in, the ceiling squats. Wolves turn their noses, and a bleary-eyed sheriff staggers up the stairs.

“Stiles can be brought back, but only if the blud is out. As long as the blud is leeching off him, he is stuck on that plane,” Magda says: “we can’t expel the blud,” she adds, moving a silencing hand in the air at the opening mouths: “but we can remind Stiles that his zawlanie still has some power left.”

“How are we going to do that?” Laura asks.

There’s a beat of silence. “Someone has to fall. Go meet him in the other realm,” Magda says then, as if it were doable.

“I’ll go,” four idiotic voices immediately claim, without knowing how, or what it entails, or how to get back.

“I’ll go,” Lydia offers too, even though she does. Knows, what it entails.

“Now wait a minute,” the Sheriff, swaying on his feet, says: “I’m his father!”

“I’m his …” Idiot McCall starts, but snaps his maw shut even before Lydia has to sear it closed with a glance.

“He must go,” Magda says, pointing at Derek. Derek, who looks oddly thin, and fragile, for a large man. A large wolf. When did Lydia start thinking of him as a man? His skin is tight and pale, bruised circles around his red eyes.

“Considering what Stiles’ zawlanie is; he must go,” Magda proclaims.

“But alpha magic can’t go into a human head,” Lydia whispers. It would kill Stiles.

“No, it can not,” Magda agrees; crosses her arms on her chest, stares Derek down.

“Take it,” the alpha says.

No pause.

No thinking.

Lydia doesn’t know what he means at first, but he’s turned slightly towards his sister, and all of the wolves are frozen in place. Eyes wide, necks stiff. If their human ears could move they’d be flat with impending danger.

“No,” Laura protests.

“Take it,” Derek growls.

“It’s dangerous, you ass,” Laura tries again.

“Take it now, or I am giving it to Jackson,” Derek says.

An overgroomed wolf in the pile flinches.

 

Gooseflesh pricks Lydia’s skin, the hair on the back of her skull stands up.

Magda slits her eyes like a snake, tilts her head in an impassive “get on with it then,” movement.

“Can it even be done?” Lydia asks, because how is Derek going to survive giving up his alpha magic, and then survive falling off this plane? How will he fight the mirages and terrors to find Stiles after all of that?

 

“No,” Laura says to Derek’s gruff: “yes.”

“I will prepare the fall,” Magda says and leaves the room.

“Please don’t,” Laura whispers into the triskele ink on her brother’s back.

“Have to,” he growls, almost too quiet for Lydia to hear – almost - but Lydia hears everything: “my fault,” he adds, even quieter.

“Not everything is always your fault,” Laura says, just as quiet.

 

It’s too much.

It’s too much to witness, and Lydia wishes she could turn her face away like the wolves, or leave to make wretched crying noises behind the door, like the sheriff. But she can’t. Lydia has never in her life been able to turn away from a train wreck.

 

He doesn’t even fight it. Laura’s claws slice into his neck, sinking into the spinal cord, and his body bows in agony, but he doesn’t lash out, doesn’t defend himself, his hands curled into bloody fists. Their animal magic howls through Magda’s warded house, bounding off the walls, shattering glass in kitchen. But Derek Hale doesn’t make a noise, his mouth is wide on a soundless scream, and tears are streaming down his sister’s face.

“She’s not wearing a shirt to wipe them into,” Lydia thinks, because arbitrary is the crutch of tragic.

“Okay,” Magda says, when the wolves slump back on the bed. Laura is staring at the blood dribbling between her fingers in horror, blinking her newly-red eyes. The rest of the pack is whimpering, like it’s them that are bleeding.

 

And what about this is okay?

 

“Okay,” Derek Hale agrees with a shredded voice.

“We’ll reel you back with this,” Magda says, pressing a serpent ring into Derek’s palm. Lydia hasn’t seen this one before. It’s too small to fit two of his fingers, so he wears it on his pinky, tucks the other part into his palm.

“We don’t have much time, so move fast. The fall is grueling, but use the disorientation to ignore, what the forest conjures up to deter you.”

Derek nods.

“Don’t let anyone in, despite of what they promise; the blud is not the only fae seeking warmth or company.”

Derek nods again.

“Do you know his scent, his heart beat?” Magda asks: “you might be able to track it even there, but be aware that it might be altered too.”

Derek’s eyes flash electric blue.

“There’s no way to reach you after you have fallen, so we are reeling you back, when the time runs up; whether you have succeeded or not,” Magda says. Her voice breaks a little - for the first time - on that last bit.

“Hold him,” she says, with that same broken voice, the fracture lines showing the human underneath the witch.

And Lydia wishes she had a way to not watch Laura and the big black wolf-man stretch Derek’s arms out. She wishes she could close her eyes to Magda driving a dipped dagger into Derek’s heart.

 

_The fraudulent fae - and Stiles is reasonably sure now, that it’s fae, because Stiles would be dead if it was a demon - keeps refusing to answer his questions. Stiles thinks it’s siphoning warmth out of his spark. It didn’t technically lie when it said it meant Stiles no harm, it’d be delighted if Stiles didn’t fade too soon. The longer Stiles lasts, the longer the fae is fed._

_But Stiles won’t last much longer._

_He’s not exactly angry. Too tired for that, but the realization seems to have unsnagged something in his head. He can feel his fingertips warm, sparks pepper up and down between them and his elbows. There seems to be something, something he can’t quite remember. A thing, or a prayer that he should know._

_The little flares - lost as to what they’re meant to do as Stiles can not recall - drip out of his fingertips. Skitter on flowing ferns like puffs of glitter. Stiles isn’t even looking, he’s so fixated on what he can’t remember that he misses them melting into a single golden thread. It embroiders a trail from fern to fern, directing Stiles to what can only be the sun, sunk from the heartless, empty skies above, to nest in the plush viridescence._

_It’s not a scary ball of raging fire though, rather a soft specter of light; spun from that same gold thread of energy that flows from Stiles’ fingers._

_Stiles stands in front of it, palms bared, soaking in the warmth. The wet weight in his chest seemingly pushing forward to heat its hide too._

_A noise rouses Stiles. A roar that rattles through the trees and bunts into his bones._ _His chest twitches._

_“Who roars like this?” Stiles asks his chest-dweller, startled into forgetting that it is killing him. It’s the two of them, after all, against the magic-made menaces of this forest._

_“Bad things,” the voice in his chest sloshes: “hide.”_

_But Stiles can’t hide; he has to protect the sun. The sun fallen from the skies, alone in the thicket of ferns. So he spells a circle around it. He doesn’t even think, just flicks his fingers used to doing that with rowan ash and salt._

_A wild beast crashes through the forest then - wet, and muddy; with bleeding scratches on its horrible, twisted face. Half man, half wild animal; eyes a searing, supernatural blue. It runs straight at him too, but it’s too late to hide, despite of what the voice in Stiles’ chest storms._

_So Stiles closes his eyes: “it’s just a terror,” he mutters under his breath: “just a magic terror made to torment me.”_

_But the terror grabs at Stiles with clawed hands - its grip too real for an apparition; bruising Stiles’ shoulders._

_“Stiles,” it gasps: “Stiles.”_

_“Who are you?” Stiles asks, even though he knows better than to talk to the ghosts of this realm._

_The beast’s face shatters at that. Folds in under the weight of what can only be described as absolute sadness._

_“Stiles,” he says again, and it sounds like blood and broken hearts._

_“No, no, don’t listen, bad spirit,” the wetness in his chest bubbles._

_The wolf-man’s nostrils flare. He stares at Stiles chest, seems to collect himself. Shakes his head out, flings heartbreak off his face like a dog flicks water from its fur._

_“That,” the he says, and pokes Stiles chest: “is a blud, throw it out.”_

_“Lies,” the watery voice pleads, but Stiles can hear the falseness. Fae really can’t._

_“A blud,” he says and feels a wave crash in his center._

_“Push him out,” the stranger demands._

_“I don’t know how,” Stiles says._

_“You do,” the man says, his eyes flashing blue: “you know me, and you know how.”_

_Stiles watches, shocked, as the stranger’s face melts into a set of astonishingly handsome features on an admittedly haggard face. A strong, sharp jaw with an angry tick in its hinge. Black thick eyebrows above a set of multicolored eyes - swirls of that same blue that seemed so scary in his beast face, mixed in some green of the ferns, but also flecks of gold, like Stiles’ magic thread, like the sun warming his back._

_“I know who you are?” Stiles asks, and the static in his fingers ricochets._

_The man nods: “you know,” he says, and rubs a thumb on Stiles neck._

_And Stiles does know._

_“Derek Hale,” he says into a white blast of magic. He thinks he maybe sees Derek smile before they’re blown to shreds._


	21. Chapter 21

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "... and Lydia wants to open a bottle of champagne. With a sword. Which she can totally do."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> well would you look at that.
> 
> *peppers kisses all around*
> 
> more on Monday.

There’s a glitch in physics, that’s what it feels like to Lydia - a flicker in frequencies. One moment, Derek and Stiles are lying on the bed - pale and fading - Derek with drying blood on his chest from where he was stabbed. And the next, there’s a brief pause - like changing channels - and they’re still on the bed, but wet, and dirty, and smelling of peat.

Derek has more blood on his skin, but no visible wounds. His eyebrows look singed. Stiles is even paler and thinner than he was a moment ago, his frailty exacerbated by the fact that he has no hair.

 

They both open their eyes for a moment. It seems almost involuntary; Stiles’ a disoriented brown, Derek’s a ready-to-fight wolf-blue. Lydia is not sure how much the see, but they do seem to realize they’re back. They speak a total of three words between the two them.

Stiles’ are: “ow,” and “dad.”

Derek’s is: “Laura.”

Then they both check out. Their eyes close, their breathing evens along with their facial expressions.

 

People’s emotions explode like a bomb. There is shouting and scrambling; surprise, joy and panic.

“Uspokój się!” Magda yells, actually yells over the commotion: “calm down! They are just sleeping.”

“They need to be taken to the hospital,” the sheriff pleads.

“No, they need rest. I will prepare herbs to help with the healing,” Magda tries to dissuade him.

“This is my son! My son, who looks like he’s just escaped Buchenwald!” the sheriff is not appeased: “mother, he has no hair!”

“The hair will come back quicker than you think,” Magda says, pats him on the arm, and leaves the room.

“You,” the sheriff snaps, pointing at the wolves: “can you, you know, with your,” he makes abstract, vaguely aggressive hand gestures in front of his own face: “are they no longer dying?”

“You mean use our ears and noses, Sheriff?” Laura asks; desert-dry.

Sheriff crosses his arms.

“They seem ok,” Laura takes pity: “they’re hearts are beating, and they’re breathing. I can’t really smell how hurt they are over the stench of whatever that is.”

“Peat,” Lydia says.

Everyone looks at her.

“Peat smells like that,” she clarifies.

“Okay then,” the over-groomed he-wolf says, rolling his eyes like a teenage shit. Jackson, Lydia thinks his name was.

“I’m cleaning them up,” Laura claims, pausing briefly for objections. But the sheriff just nods, mutely, walks out of the bedroom, and a moment later Lydia hears him turning taps.

“Boyd, Scott, go help the sheriff bring over some water; find something big - a pale, or a bucket, and towels.” Laura is giving orders. It looks good on her. Makes sense.

“There’s a large pale in the garage,” Lydia says.

Laura flicks a from under her eyebrows. Lydia sees her reigning in an order. She really is quite admirable, even if incomprehensibly persevering.

“Would you get it?” Laura asks.

Lydia nods.

“Jackson, help me get off their pants and shoes.”

Lydia sees the prettywolf grimace, but he doesn’t argue, starts on Stiles sodden chucks.

 

A sponge bath only goes so far. But the smell is less pungent now, and they look less like they’ve crawled out from a hole in the ground. The clean up attempt reveals they’re holding hands too, serpent ring to serpent ring.

 

*

 

Stiles hair comes in blue.

There are no two ways about it. It’s not a little bluish. No. It’s just blue. Really, really, very blue.

Sheriff keeps rubbing his palm on the alien looking bristles, shaking his head.

 

*

 

“Derek’s waking up,” Laura says 48 hours later. They’ve been keeping vigil in shifts, all too exhausted for more. The wolves have found a hotel room. Or multiple, Lydia doesn’t know. They leave and come back in pairs. Scott rubs his face against Stiles’ arm a lot and looks like he wants to claw his own face off.

Lydia almost feels sorry for him. Relief has made her soft.

 

Laura never leaves. She meekly asks Magda to use her shower, gratefully accepts the change of clothes Lydia offers her, but never leaves. Takes short naps, with her head resting on the bed. Holds her brother’s hand.

The wolves bring her food. Lydia realizes she should have offered her more than what she offers the sheriff, when she sees her packing away an entire pizza in four, folded up pieces. Five inhuman bites per oversized slice.

 

“How can you tell?” Lydia asks, because it’s just the two of them in the room right now.

Laura shrugs, digs her phone out from her back pocket. Hits a number on speed dial and says: “bring the meat,” to whomever has picked up.

“You may want to leave for this,” she says, looking back at Lydia.

Lydia sticks her chin out.

Laura flicks her wrist and it’s the most dismissive gesture Lydia has ever seen. She’s a little jealous.

 

Lydia expects something loud and violent, as she was asked to leave, but Derek just opens his eyes. They shine blue, then fade to his human pale color.

“Hi,” Laura whispers.

“Hi,” he says, voice scratchy.

“You did good, pup,” Laura says, bringing their twined fingers up, kissing her brother’s knuckles.

Lydia realizes she’s never seen Derek Hale smile. Not that he had much reason to smile so far. But it’s really odd and vulnerable, and makes Lydia wish she had left the room after all.

 

He sits up slowly, keeping one of his hands still clutched in Stiles’. Eats what looks like 6 pounds of raw beef with his other. Accepts hugs from all of the wolves as they turn up.

 

 

“You really need to take a shower,” Laura murmurs, head resting on his shoulder. Derek shifts the hand he’s holding Stiles’ with, doesn’t say anything.

“He’ll be fine for 10 minutes, you can hear his heart, he’s just resting.”

Derek still doesn’t say anything.

“Lydia,” Laura says then: “could you please get Mrs. Stilinska, so she could tell my stubborn brother that he can go pee and wash himself, until he stops smelling like rotten eggs; and that Stiles will not disappear during that time.”

Derek growls, but doesn’t say he’s fine without the reassurance.

It kind of makes Lydia laugh, and the sensation is so alien in her chest that she forgets to hold on, lets it slip as she walks down the hall. Giggles bubble up her throat and out of her mouth as she enters Magda’s study.

Magda eyes her carefully, rubs her knobby fingers down Lydia’s cheeks.  
“You’re a good girl, Lydia Martin,” she says.

 

She does go and promise Derek Hale that Stiles will not slip back into the magic realm while he showers. Accepts the serpent ring from him with an almost-fond smile.

 

*

 

Stiles wakes up 24 hours later, when only Lydia and Derek are in the room. He jackknifes up and looks like a confused blue hedgehog.

“Oh,” he says, blinking at Lydia.

Derek’s on the bed with him; still holding Stiles’ hand.

“You,” Stiles says, touching Derek’s forehead: “thanks.”

There’s a flash of magic, a smell of ozone followed by soothing petrichor, and Stiles passes out again.

Derek is shaking his head like his ears are ringing.

“What?” Lydia asks, but before she gets an answer, there are people barging into the room. A crimson-eyed Laura, a surprised looking Magda, and finally, a worried sheriff.

“What happened?” they all demand.

“I,” Derek says, rubbing a hand on his forehead, then his chest, like it hurts. He opens his eyes.

They’re red.

 

Laura stumbles to a halt. Growls on what must be instinct.

Derek growls back, flings out of the bed.

Two alphas.

They’re not exactly circling each other, but the staring is intense.

 

“What happened, is Stiles OK?” the sheriff asks, oblivious to the challenge of animal magic happening under his eyes.

 

Derek and Laura take a step closer, but there are no claws. No fangs. They stare for a beat longer, then press their foreheads together. Lydia sees Laura’s lips moving, but she can’t hear them.

 

“He woke up for a moment,” Lydia says.

“That's a good sign, right?” sheriff asks, touching his son wherever he can reach.

“His magic is very strong,” Magda mutters.

“Oh god,” sheriff says, holding up the hand he was stroking Stiles with. It’s filled with short blue hair.

“That’s it, I’m taking him to the hospital. I think he’s poisoned. This is what happens, when people are poisoned, his hair is falling out. Again. His blue hair!”

Magda rubs a soothing hand on his back.

“Calm yourself, son,” she says, but Lydia knows her better than anyone. This is not Magda’s calm voice.

 

“He gave me back the alpha powers,” Derek suddenly says.

He’s standing a couple of steps from the bed and flashes his eyes.

“Did he lift it back?” Magda asks, using her business voice now.

“No,” Laura says, and flashes hers.

“Interesting,” Magda says, and scurries out of the room. The sheriff is despondently picking up clumps if blue hair from Stiles’ pillow.

“I’ll do that, sheriff,” Lydia says: “go take a nap, maybe have a sandwich? I made some earlier, they’re in the fridge.”

 

*

 

When Stiles wakes up again, the room is nearly full of people. Sheriff is reading a newspaper in the chair by the window. Derek and Laura are sitting on the edge of the bed, side by side, bodies half turned towards Stiles’ sleeping form. Lydia is on the floor, back against the wall. Scott and Erica next to her, a couple of feet towards the door.

Nobody sees or feels it coming.

 

Suddenly Stiles just says: “god, what is that smell?”

And the sheriff is the first to collect himself this time, even if his voice is a little wet around the edges.

“Afraid it’s you son,” he says.

“Huh,” Stiles replies, slowly sitting up. He scratches absent-mindedly at his bare chest. Lydia sees trails of golden glow emerge and fade underneath his fingers. It’s like Stiles is lighting up from the inside wherever he touches himself.

“Stiles!” she says, but it’s lost in a multiplicity of other voices saying the same thing. Sheriff is bringing his son in for a hug, patting his back, crying again.

“So, I’m thinking,” Stiles says, when he’s released. He shifts his weight, carefully places the soles of his feet on the floor: “that shower first, stories later?”

He stands, wobbles a little, but straightens himself before Derek, having jumped across the bed, lands next to him.

There’s a moment where they just look at each other. The right side of Stiles’ mouth quirks up, and he touches his fingertips to Derek’s chest.

“Do you need help?” Derek asks.

Stiles winks.

“Maybe later, big guy,” he adds.

The tips of Derek’s ears turn red, and Stiles laughs.

He honest to god laughs, and Lydia wants to open a bottle of champagne. With a sword. Which she can totally do.

“I wanna see that, Lyds,” Stiles says, rubs a grimy finger across her cheekbone as he passes.

 

And what?

 

Stiles scritches his fingers through Laura’s messy hair walking past her, and says: “lighten up, Scotty, we’ll figure it out,” before he’s out of the room.

 

The tattoo on his back, the one that Lydia put there, with her own hands and an ink gun filled with magic, the one that still needed work the last time she saw it; seems to be glowing gold as well. As if it was sliced into his skin, and the light in Stiles was spearing through.

 

And, really. What?

 

Scott McCall looks like he’s seen Jesus. Sheriff looks like he needs some more Zubrowka. Laura and Derek are having a wolf conversation in facial ticks and bulging eyes. So Lydia smoothens her clothes, tucks hair behind her ears and goes to find Magda.


	22. Chapter 22

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stiles has to learn the trade. Derek has to process. Boston is cold.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've made an executive decision that chapter 23 will be the last chapter of this story. So this one and then one more, and then we're done. for this. for now.
> 
> Thank's for flying Sarcasticbones, here's your complimentary ladanki bag. 
> 
> <3

Stiles pulls on the drawstring of his hoodie and hunches his shoulders. This fucking city, man. Cold. So cold. Why would anyone live on the East coast? He refuses to walk the one stop and dips under ground. Deaton rode him so hard today he kind of feels like filing a complaint. Maybe there’s a union for apprentice mages, who are whipped into froth by their overly ambitious mentors.

 

_“It’s a rare gift, Stiles.”_

_“Unprecedented at such young age, Stiles.”_

_“Focus, Stiles.”_

Easy-peasy, right? Because focus has always been such a strong suit.

 

He hops what’s probably the last T of the day, and takes a look around. A couple of groggy students that got on with him, and an older man in the far corner, sleeping. Stiles takes a breath, and tries to unfold his senses the way Deaton’s been teaching him.

 

They’ve cinched his … whatever the thing is that occasionally lets him see into people’s minds, and Stiles is quite grateful to Deaton for it. Because that shit was hard, man. And unpredictable. And made Stiles feel crazy. Stiles is not too fond of feeling crazy after everything. Being possessed and nearly drowned by a magical leech does that to a man. So the whole head-hopping thing’s got a supernatural knot in it, until further notice.

 

But Stiles can sort of feel the energies around him even without having to barge into people’s heads. It works based on a different magical sense, and Stiles apparently has multiple. It’s one of the things that the flower gave him. Amplified, according to Deaton. The Fire Flower from Magda’s Polish fairytales, which Stiles didn’t know one had to make a circle around to harvest, but had managed to in a displaced hallucination of protecting a fallen sun from a charging beast.

 

Yeah, no. Never again.

Seriously.

Super-fancy mage-in-the-making or not, Stiles is never going back there. His hair fell out three times. Three! His dad cried. It also kept coming back in different colors. Stiles tugs a hand through the couple of inches of brown strands. Those seem like they’re gonna stay. Then again the last batch of purple did as well.

 

Anyway, energies, yes. Stiles carefully extends his feelers, pushed up and out, like Deaton’s told him, and promptly gags; has to rest his weight against the jittery side of the moving train. Because the sleeping man in the corner is sick. Stiles gives him a month, tops.

 

He almost misses his stop; scrambles to slip through the sliding doors. Shakes like a dog, and tries to adjust his senses again. Something snags, like a bell on a trip wire. It definitely feels … different here, just a trickle at first, but as he makes his way out of the station and turns the first corner it gets stronger. The richer, darker feel of not-human. Specifically shifter. More specifically wolf. A couple more steps and Stiles’ tattoos skitter. Spit pools in his mouth. If energies were flavors this particular one would be umami; the savory ‘more-more-more’ of a six-hour bone-broth or vine ripened tomatoes.

 

This one he knows. It’s not just a wolf; it’s his gloomy Alpha. Lurking somewhere - nose twitching - trying to separate Stiles from the felt of smells and noises the city shrinks into them all. Feeling guilty for being here and unable to stay away. Equal parts disapproving and desperate; because he didn’t come out of the whole realm-hopping quest unchanged either.

 

“Hey big guy,” Stiles whispers into the night, and ends up pressed against the wall. Pointy tip of a nose dragging up and down his neck, soft stubble catching on the cotton of his hoodie, a broad hand separating his skull from the brick.

“Rough day?” Stiles asks.

Derek chuffs - hot, wet breaths - then a broad tongue laps, once, twice, across his neck. “Yes,” he growls.

“Poor baby,” Stile says, and rubs his fingers through Derek’s hair. He can feel something soothing flow from their tips into Derek’s skull. He didn’t mean to, just happened. Shit’s not conscious, ok? Which Deaton says is “VERY DANGEROUS!”

“I wish you could come with, but you know what Deaton says. Bad for my focus blah blah blah, dangerous blah blah blah.”

“Stop making me feel better,” Derek grumbles, still half into the neck of Stiles’ hoodie.

“Stop telling me what to do,” Stiles counters.

Partly, because hell yea, no one tells Stiles what to do. Partly, to lift the conversation from where it seems to be heading. Because, post-blud, Derek alternates between two kinds of existence. Guilt-trodden, gloomy man-pain over what he defines as his fault in getting Stiles “nearly killed” – “come on, kind of hurt, Gerard was not going to kill me and the blud was not your fault” - “stop diminishing it, Stiles”; and ridiculously horny and snuggly wolf-joy, over what the beast sees as an awesome victory and a saved mate, so why aren’t there cubs already.

Yeah, the M-word is an actual thing.

And Derek’s wolf is all about it.

Laura told Stiles.

She also told Stiles that he has to let Derek process at his own speed, because guilt is his go-to reaction. So Stiles tries. He almost doesn’t push for a conversation about the whole mate thing, but often enough they end up on the same old track of: “you shouldn’t be nice to me, I deserve to suffer.”

 

Which, frankly, no. Just no.

Stiles says that everyone has suffered enough, and there will be no more suffering. Since people seem to think he’s some bad-ass wizard now, his word counts. Right? Not to mention that he kind of finds the snuggly parts of the wolf really cute. And the horny parts, well … uh. What was he saying?

 

“Stiles,” Derek grumbles, hands tightening around him.

“Yes?” Stiles asks, tongue as far in cheek as the single word allows. Because he knows what Derek smells, and he knows how the wolf in the equation will react.

“Lydia said we can’t fuck in the apartment anymore.”

Which, she did.

More precisely she said: “please, for the love of fairydust, stop boning like bunnies, all of Magda’s _ladanki_ bags are turning into sex-pollen and the people of Boston needed those.”

Which was kind of funny, and then not, because Stiles had to redo all of the bags and it took him days. Lydia, the traitor, sold all the “ruined” ones anyway, and knowing the market for any kind of sex sparkle probably made a shit-ton of cash.

 

“It’s my apartment too, and I really wanna,” Stiles murmurs; pushing into Derek’s touch, lining up their bodies - spark point to spark point, magic to magic - gasps at the impact.

Derek makes a noise. There is no word for it, but Stiles knows what it means. It’s comes from deep within Derek’s belly and carries all different hues of frustration.

“C’mon alpha,” Stiles says, twisting out of the wolf’s grip, grabbing his hand and breaking into a run towards his building: “you say you don’t wanna rub up in all this?”

Stiles ends up the one dragged along as they make their way to the door, then through it, then up the three flights of stairs because Derek’s eyes are flickering, and he can’t wait for the elevator.

 

It’s a good thing Lydia is out, because they make a lot of noise falling into the apartment. Stiles flicks a haphazard ward around the kitchen table to protect the few _ladanki_ bags there, but Derek is already peeling him out of his clothes. Stiles’ wrists slide free of his hoodie and he snags the hem of his own t-shirt to pull it over his head. Derek’s fingers walk hotly across his skin - no claws - he’s so careful. Blunt fingertips leave a trail of hungry touches from Stiles’ clavicles, over his shoulders, down his arms. A pattern of glowing indents, lighting up from the inside with Stiles magic. Derek’s hands trace his ribs; pause on the soft give of his waist and skim to the narrow points of his hips.

Stiles is pushing Derek’s leather jacket over the strong, flexing shoulders; rubbing his greedy hands down an expanse of a back, muscles thrumming under thin, sweat-damp cotton.

“C’mon, c’mon,” Stiles chants; dives right for Derek’s belt buckle as the wolf discards the black tee. It’s the metallic click, the little shrapnel of a sound that signals a gear change. A shift from a torn-Derek to an alpha wolf licking its chops.

 

Snag and clasp, he catches Stiles’ wrists; brings them up to his face, scrapes his elongated canines across the thin membrane of skin there. Snaps the button of Stiles’ jeans and literally walks him out of the pants; backwards across the dark living room, unerring like a boat in charted waters. Thumbs brush the top of Stiles’ butt as Derek pushes his boxers over the curve of flesh; bumps the bedroom door open using Stiles’ back.

“You’re still wearing pants,” Stiles points out.

Derek makes an assenting noise. A soft hrmmm rolling from his chest. It vibrates in Stiles’ dick.

“I can’t really help you with that, unless you give me back my hands,” Stiles offers.

And one of Derek’s eyebrows ticks up, a Hale move through and through. So Stiles uses the few fingers that are mobile to spell a snip and tuck. Cut some threads. Watches Derek’s eyes widen as his perfectly form hugging jeans slowly slide down his hips.

“Bad boy,” Derek says, mouth full of teeth Stiles is not afraid of.

Stiles shrugs: “bad-ass mage, remember?”

Derek growls, releases the hold on his wrists, but trips him with a classic ankle sweep, lands them in bed. Stiles’ face and chest are pressed into the sheets, knees folded; 190 pounds of wolf pressing him into a bean between animal magic and the bed.

“Alpha werewolf, remember?” Derek licks into the shell of his ear. It drips into Stiles’ brain; turns his bone into brimstone, and his blood in to gasoline. He flexes his thighs, spreads and pushes up, cants his bare ass into Derek’s crotch like a bitch.

“Yeah?” he pants: “you gonna mount me, big guy?”

“Yes,” Derek says, simply, no bullshit; a promise sealed into his spine with teeth closing around knobs of bone.

“Gonna make you cry on my cock,” he adds. Presses a heavy hand into the back of Stiles’ head. Stiles’ dick twitches and blurts. The hum of magic grows in pitch, fills the room with a dull orange glow.

“Gonna fuck you so full of come your magic will know nothing else but to mold it into pups,” Derek promises. Shifts his weight. Spits.

Stiles keens.

He can feel Derek dragging the wetness along Stiles’ taint. Rolling silky wet fingers over his entrance, massaging the spit in, kneading the resistance out of the flesh until he’s butter soft. Until he parts and begs.

“You want that, mage?”

The “yes” hisses out of Stiles, drawn and desperate.

“Yeah?” Derek hums, gentler now; sun-warm and fern-soft: “you need me to fill you up, baby?”

And Stiles’ eyes cross as he wails his first orgasm.

 

“Stiles,” Lydia calls: “Scott sent another pizza, how many is he going to send?”

Pale morning light is untangling the curtains, and Stiles hides a smile in the soft skin of Derek’s side. Because Scott is doing penance too, and apparently guilt in wolf translates to provisions. And provisions in Scott translates into pizza. Stiles has eaten a lot of pizza.

“Can’t he send something healthier?” Lydia grouses. Stiles hears her keys clatter into the bowl in the hallway, then feels her energy change.

“Oh, for fuckssake, Stiles!” he hears her huff.

Which … fair enough, there’s probably clothes throughout the living room.

Stiles sighs, tries to get his arms under to go appease her, see if the wards worked to spare the _ladanki_ from the avalanche of sex magic.

“No,” Derek grumbles without opening his eyes, tightens his hold on Stiles.

“Sorry Lyds,” Stiles calls: “I’ll clean up later?”

Lydia is muttering something Stiles can’t hear. He can sense her snapping the ward he put in the kitchen.

“There’s a jungle in the living room,” Lydia yells.

And Derek’s hold grows slack at that. Because, yeah - Stiles accidentally grew some trees for Derek - back during those first days; and tulips on his mom’s grave, in January. But he … he hasn’t been growing shit lately. He though he’d figured out how not to. He told Deaton he’s got it under control.

“Shit,” he whispers. And Derek sighs. The pain in it is turning Stiles tongue numb.

“No,” Stiles starts.

“They’re right, I’m distracting you, I have to go back home,” Derek says, but squeezes Stiles tighter.


	23. Chapter 23

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> last chapter, bunnies.  
> Stiles goes home.
> 
> Notes in the end this time.  
> <3

When Stiles is getting ready to see the Hales again – the two by blood, others by fate – he is 22 years old, and standing between the burn-marked oaks a couple of dozen of yards from the renovated house in the preserve. He’s masked his scent with some simple spells, so he can watch his fill; find his courage; decide on a course.

 

Because it’s been three years.

He might not be welcome here.

There may not be space for him here.

He didn’t expect them to wait; any of them. He wanted them to live their lives.

 

It’s been 35 months since he’s seen Derek, since he’s seen anyone, really. Deaton cut him off completely. He’s spoken to Lydia now and again during the most recent six, but before that it was complete radio silence. Just Stiles, his magic, and an endless throng of competent but compassionless teachers. Turns out shattering loneliness is conducive to sharp supernatural focus.

 

_Things come at a price, Stiles._

He can’t remember which one of his mentors said that, and platitudes are much harder to tell apart from profundity than Stiles would have assumed prior to all this.

 

He rests a hand on the nearest tree, feels it hum and offer up its secrets to the insistence of his palm. He politely refuses. There are too many secrets in this world for Stiles to be the keeper of them all.

The house thrums with life though. He can feel it, taste it. Tries not to be intrusive; holds back from separating threads of energy, telling one wolf apart from another. But he can feel Scott and he can sense the double-helix of Hale alpha; they’re alive and well, and that should be enough.

The door opens, and Stiles pulls back; melts to the dark bark of the oak. Scott and Isaac jump over the porch railing, land on the ground with thuds that reverberate through the soles of Stiles sneakers. They circle each other, getting ready to train, maybe just playing, Stiles isn’t sure. He lets his eyes linger on his best friend. His former best friend? How do these things even work? Stiles still feels that tug of familiarity, but feelings don’t require reciprocity to exist.

There’s a triskele tattooed on Scott’s arm. He seems centered, anchored in pack and love. And he looks grown, he looks good. He feels like he’s good too - a flash of fresh flavor on the tip of Stiles’ tongue, like a droplet you lick from your forearm after tearing apart an orange.

Stiles ... doesn’t look good. He doesn’t look bad either, he thinks, he’s not really sure about these things any more. It’s difficult to separate the more obvious from the less after studying the shadows for so long. He’s taller again. Still thin, but not fragile. There isn’t a person on this planet who’d look at Stiles and think him fragile. Stiles is a woody wine, a liana. Stiles is, frankly, Poison Ivy. His eyes are darker and deeper. His fingers are ridiculously nimble. Magician’s hands - make you laugh, make you cry, make you look the other way - hands that can do anything. He’s no longer pale. But he doesn’t look … he doesn’t look bursting with life like the wolves do. He looks what he is - tight and tense and contained. And he has gray hair. Ok, not gray-gray. But there’s that one strand that is unmistakably gray, silver almost.

 

Because things come at a price for Stiles. And it was really hard there, for a while. He learned a lot, but would he buy that knowledge at the price it came with; knowing what that suffering feels like? A pointless question without an answer. But sometimes Stiles still picks at his scabs. People don’t really change.

His magic itches to seek out Derek, but he keeps it in check. He has no right to. It’s been three years since Derek got out of bed, hacked down the strangler figs and the bromeliads attempting to take over the living room; squared his shoulders against the pain, and made the choice Stiles was too weak to make. He left. Went back to Beacon Hills despite his wolf fighting him tooth and nail. And he didn’t come back, even when Stiles called, and cried, and begged. Even when Stiles’ treacherous Spark tried setting the apartment on fire every night for a week.

Because Stiles was getting nowhere with Derek around.

He sublimated mastery for evasion, used Derek’s dick as a lightning rod. Channeled, didn’t own.

Deaton knew it. Lydia knew it. Stiles probably knew it as well; he just didn’t want to face another quest. How many quests does a person have to go on before coming of legal age for an American drink? But magic of that magnitude couldn’t be unmanaged. So Derek muzzled his wolf, and Stiles went on another fucking quest.

And a quest it was. After basically keeping Stiles hostage in a musty, hidden office at Harvard for six months, Deaton shipped him off to Krakow. He didn’t see any of its beauty, just the insides of a castle basement. From there he was sent to Tbilisi, then St. Petersburg, then Tallinn and finally Florence. At least Florence was warm. And Stiles was deemed fit for open air and public spaces by then. So he roamed the narrow streets and the piazzas, tweaked and tinkered with his skill amidst the dazed tourists and the shrewd-eyed locals. Picked up some Italian, a Chianti preference too expensive to maintain in America, and a ridiculous bread habit.

And now he’s been released. Declared fit for an independent life by a number of international authorities on the matter. Set loose to find purpose.

So Stiles came home.

But he has to ask the Hales if he can still call it that. It’s pack land, in supernatural terms, and a mage of his caliber can’t just squat.

And he will ask. He will watch his fill, find his courage, choose his path, and he will ask. If not today then soon. He could probably get away with spell-veiled lurking for a couple of days. Hang out with his dad; visit the cemetery. Make peace with being asked to leave, should that come about.

The front door opens again - a slice into another life - and Derek steps out on the porch. He’s barefoot, in a pair of fraying blue jeans, and a tight gray tank top. His hair is a little longer than Stiles remembers, and mussed beyond what he’s ever seen. He’s still as broad though, still as strong. The swell his pectorals, deltoids and trapezius muscles dip under a pronounced clavicle with distinction that borders on surreal. But he seems softer too, less tightly wound. The skin around his eyes is not stretched too thin. There’s no tick in the hinge of his jaw.

Maybe there’s a balance in the world after all. Where Stiles got compressed into a clenched fist of magic, Derek got loosened into a beautiful man, a beautiful wolf, with a good life.

He had some help too. Because there’s a baby on his hip.

A tiny, pudgy thing gnawing at his bare shoulder, smearing it with spit.

 

Stiles feels his heart grow and ache. Expand until his ribs crack. Because this is good.

It’s fair.

It’s right.

Derek deserves this.

Stiles will go to his dad’s now. Breathe. Adjust. Find the least destructive way of letting the pack know he’s alive, and available for magical services, should those be needed. Tell them how he can be reached without imposing on their life. Maybe move back in with Magda.

He should call Lydia for advice. This is what people do, he reminds himself. It’s what people do. He’s not alone. Despite of what his tutelage charred into his soul, he is not.

So he’ll call, and ask Lydia for one of those updates on the Hales he knows she’s always had, but allowed him the choice of avoiding. For a woman so adamantly above ‘those beasts’, as she used to say, she seems to have warmed to them. Sought them out when Stiles was gone. Stiles gets that. Being lonely cores you in that softest place; scrapes you clean of your gooey center. And people are better with their gooey centers in place.

He turns away from the house. Rests his back against the oak, uses it to funnel some of this excess into earth; wipes his eyes and whispers a silent thank you to the tree.

 

“Stiles?”

He thinks he maybe imagines it. He’d want to, and the mind can give you anything. Stiles knows that.

But he hears it again; soft spoken and hesitant; as if Derek’s not sure what he’s saying, or why. Stiles peers around the tree. Derek is still on the porch and he looks stunned. His gaze bounces around the yard.

“Derek?”

Scott and Isaac have stopped what they were doing. The baby in Derek’s arms is making grabby hands at Scott, who walks over, mildly alarmed; looking at his alpha with a crease in his brow, and says: “come to daddy,” takes the child.

“Stiles?” Derek repeats one more time. Slowly takes the four steps down, cocks his head and starts, unerringly, towards the old oaks Stiles is hiding behind. He can hear Stiles’ heart, Stiles realizes.

So Stiles steps out from behind the tree, smiles a half-smile; because he’s not a child anymore and he can face this. Not to mention that that is apparently Scott’s baby. Which doesn’t mean anything, Stiles reminds himself. Because the house might be full of babies and some of them might be Derek’s, he has no right to assume that not to be the case.

“Stiles!” Scott gasps, almost dropping the only proven baby. Isaac starts on an awkward wave, aborts half way through, scratches his head. Stiles waves back, grateful for the extension on when he’ll have to look Derek in the eye.

 

The door swings open again, harder than strictly necessary and Laura barges out; yells an agitated: “Derek, what?!” into the thickening air.

Stiles waves at Laura too.

Watches her eyes grow big, then red; then flick back and forth between Stiles’ static smile, and her brother’s retreating back.

“Hey kid,” Laura finally says, because she’s nothing if not persistent: “long time no see.” She smiles at him with all of her teeth, shrapnel-sharp, but not unkind.

“Right, everyone inside. Come to Laura pup,” she adds, and Stiles sees Scott stomp in place, unsure. But the door closes and they’re all behind it, and it’s just him and a barefoot Derek, standing in the grass, close enough to reach and touch. There’s nowhere for Stiles to look than into those kaleidoscope eyes.

“Hi,” Derek says.

“Hi,” Stiles agrees.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ugh ... so ... this is it.
> 
> it's all for my darlin' @aerialiste - cherries and blood and all. 
> 
> I set out to write some smut, play with the pretty pretty toys, but the story grew claws, and wings, and three heads and had other plans. It's got its hooks so deep in my chest now, that I desperately want to keep writing it. But I have to do other stuff too. And I'm obsessive, when I start, as you may have noticed from the daily update schedule. So I can't start right now. Speaking from experience tho, a story will hatch, and start scratching in my skull, and when the scratching gets loud enough I'll break and write. Ideally i'd also like to re-read, maybe edit this thing. did i mention obsessive?
> 
> So, what I think will happen, is that there will be some smutty one-shots of all that sex I didn't get to write, because people were constantly like ... dying or super duper depressed, but those will still belong in this remixed realm of TW, because I like it. And then maybe there will be a plot based sequel.
> 
> anyway, thank you for reading, plying my greedy little heart with algorithmically enhanced love and commenting.  
> laters babies.


	24. not really a chapter

Heya, so if you were reading this story and enjoying it, then I wrote a little porny addendum, as I promised I would.   
But it's Derek/Laura, so of you think that is bad-wrong in a bad way then it's obvs not for you http://archiveofourown.org/works/8134699


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